Music
Elusive electronica auteur Ben Khan talks Salvador Dalí, Morris dancers and his new 1000 EP.
Scour the internet for a few days and still you’ll only be able to count the facts you’ve learned about mysterious musician, producer and artist Ben Khan on a couple of fingers. Even when his first EP, 1992, was clocking up hundreds of thousands of plays on SoundCloud, the 22-year-old kept his cards close to his chest. “I’m plenty interesting, it’s just who I am though,” explains Ben.
But now he’s releasing his second EP, 1000 (out now on his Blessed Vice imprint), will Ben, who’s been compared to the enigmatic Jai Paul and whose moody, swampy soundscapes take in blues, R&B, hip-hop and beyond, reveal a little more about himself?
We caught up with this fast-rising hybrid-pop maker before he took to the road for his first-ever gigs to see what else we could find out.
Watch the video for 1000 by Ben Khan in the player below.
Ben’s greatest influence is film I consume movies like food, crack, whatever. It’s exactly the same as music – it’s the ultimate escape where nothing about you matters at that point. I’ve been watching a lot of Polanski and Kubrick. The Shining, for instance, I’ll watch two or three times a year. A lot of my favourite films have loose narratives and ambiguous imagery, and all these things that don’t feel like they should go together but do, leaving a lot open to interpretation so the viewer can find their own way through it. That’s what I like to do. I look at each song as its own thing.
He questions everything The thing I take from world music – Punjab music and Indian music, for instance – is the raw emotion. It’s spiritual music, healing music. My dad [from Kashmir] comes from quite a spiritual place and knows some funny people, Men of God, is how they say it. It has always fascinated me. I’ve got a song, which you haven’t heard yet, and there’s a lyric in it about faith being the weirdest sensation. There’s a story my dad told me about a guy who was told his future and it has played out word for word. That sh*t messes me up. I still don’t believe it, but I don’t not believe it either. It leaves me in a state of hanging.
Discover Ben Khan’s myriad influences in the playlist below.
Don’t call him a bedroom producer What the f*ck is that? It sounds patronising. I heard someone call Flying Lotus a bedroom producer once and I thought, come on, man. A producer to someone 10 years older than me is someone who records bands direct from the studio and takes on the director role. But the producer role for my generation is a guy who makes a sick beat on a laptop. I’m somewhere in between.
He grew up around Morris dancers In Adderbury, Oxfordshire, where the Morris dancers are. Will I be labelled the kid who came from a Morris-dancing community? It’s a quiet town, everyone knows everyone. I just tried to cause havoc. In hindsight, though, I think it played a big part in my life. My formative years weren’t sculpted by anything apart from what my real interests were. I had my skateboard, my guitar, my video games, my films, and that was it. I knew what I wanted to do. You had to find something.
He’s a big fan of Salvador Dalí He just speaks to me. It’s the raw subconscious that’s looking at you. The way he’s taken something so objectively out of his head and put it down physically, that’s incredible. It reflects back at you like a Rorschach and you take your own meaning from it, which is one of my favourite things to do with art. Just take away what you decide. Ben Khan is on Facebook.
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