H.D. Reliquary is the first eponymous release from Ben Shirken [a.k.a. Ex Wiish], and finds him returning home to 29 Speedway. The songs sparked during sessions with close collaborators - across 11 pieces, artists such as Pavel Milyakov, MIZU, Dorothy Carlos, Kevin Eichenberger and Muein breathe personality into the record. H.D.R. coaxes beauty from a serrated, raw, yet subdued palette drawn from improvised recordings of trumpet, violin, upright bass, cello, Max/MSP and modular synthesis.

The title references the hard drive as a sacred container for relics, contemplating how digitally archived fragments of one's existence can burn eternally after death. Archives, and in this case recordings, splinter and warp. Some distort what they contain. Some vanish, and others are eternally preserved, immune to deletion. Your information on these digital drives becomes archival shrapnel, the music that survives the remnants of collaboration.

Quick to note the dangers of creating music with ecologically intensive, mass marketed, and unethically trained AI software, Shirken employed bespoke, resource-light machine listening techniques for some of the compositional process. Pieces of recordings were fed into a series of proprietary neural networks, generating MIDI information and audio that reacted to on-the-fly soloing, imaginary sessions between players and algorithms invented posthumously (in post).

Shirken will release H.D. Reliquary alongside a sound installation on April 11. He has performed in spaces such as The New Museum, Pioneer Works, Public Records and Nowadays in New York City; Dripping Music And Arts Festival in New Jersey; La Station in Paris; and Cafe Oto in London. In recent years, he has also been a foundation of the elusive free jazz group Nu Jazz. Where his prior work was geared towards dissociation, H.D. Reliquary invites us to contemplate how our tools for understanding and containing the world fundamentally alter our relationship with it.

Written, recorded, & mixed by Ben Shirken
Greg's Thesis mixed by Jason Park
Mastered by Stephan Mathieu @ Schwebung Mastering
Art & Design by Brian Mark
29 Speedway 2025
29S07

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Greg's Thesis w/ Kevin Eichenberger

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