The craft of pop is centered around something that is so much more than just the medium unto itself. The power of the artifice is its ability to transform, change, inform and elaborate into any other form that it inspires according to its own merit. A novel can be adapted into a film. A story and/or script can be conveyed in a painting. A sound can have a visual counterpart. A musical entity can be attributed to so many other emergent forms of media beyond the scope of limitations. The truest forms of art are anthropological studies in cultural evolution; surveys of humanities that cannot be contained to simply the confines of the stretched canvas at the artist’s bench.

Cue the new Beshken album Pantomime from Ben Shirken, the following up to the debut album Aisle of Palm from 2019 that expounds upon the constructs of what electronically driven music can be. Working with classmate Jason Park from the NYU Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, percussionist Matt Bent, to visual art collaborators Jack Wedge and Will Freudenheim from Laser Days studios and more; Shirken and cohorts bridge the experimental dojo arena of the avant garde into something accessible and absolutely ecstatic. Pantomime connects the dots between street level asphalt arts to the lofty schools of music theorems and conjectures typically reserved for grad school discourse and other such associative dissertations.

Pantomime works like an expansive ambient street performance event soundtracked as the score of an elaborate art film. Like an organic supplement arising to aural life, "Melatonin" springs off the bodega shelf and into the ears and eyes of the audience's minds. The album gracefully and gallantly turns with care and considerations for the sands of time on the spirit drifting "Hourglass" (Spinning Around)", to experiments with tonal resonance on "Self Defense" that descends into the inner meditative sanctum of the human self that edifies the ineffable awe of the aura that shines deep within the nucleus kernel of the soul. "Anti Heaven" paints a musical portrait that resembles an idea of paradise found on the earthly foundation of drum and bass rhythms that rise upwards toward the righteous atmospheres of the celestial skies. The big beat bouncing single "Social Suicide" inverts the obsessions of intranets and other ills of insular media that drives forward toward a realm beyond the pale of malicious online meandering and the spirit crushing detriments of doom scrolling. "M.I.A." is variations on the themes of the previous track, riding high on the visceral rhythms for far away locales and exotic destinations (both geographically and perchance metaphysically).

An electric effervescence permeates throughout "Ella" like an underscored sentimental scene with a beloved kindred connection, as "The Ocean, El Diablo" dives into the raging waters and heavy chop of the Atlantic in pursuit of great new depths of inspiration and invigorated realms of self-discovery. The organic key progressions in conjunction with the jittery d & b applications on "Caffeine High" gently rumbles like the euphoria found in that first sip from the first cup of the day that rockets one away to those involved spaces of productivity and visions unlimited by any foreseeable hindrances or prohibitory blockades. Keeping with the cinematic styled orchestrations found throughout Pantomime, "Locked Out" brings the sentiment of tension that exhibits the mood of the interior upon discovery of being outside from where one wishes to be. This penultimate cut leads to the closing track "Under Your Skin" that delves beneath the epidermal surfaces for something that is serene, calming, enlightening and entrancing like nothing that can be articulated with the conventions of contemporary systems of modern day semantics and/or slang. Pantomime is a return to the multidisciplinary arts that reaches toward these new mediums that stretch beyond the statements of sounds.

Beshken’s new album Pantomime will be available February 18 via MATH Interactive.