Incorporating field recordings and other organic sounds into a keyboard-heavy atmosphere is nothing new. Still, Ben Dexter Cooley is a master of this genre, and Forager shows him doing it with grace and eloquence. St. Silva is Cooley’s electro-acoustic project, described on his Bandcamp page as a “musician, researcher, and creative technologist”.
Forager is a composite of material recorded months before its recontextualization. “Time creates distance,” explains Cooley, “sometimes a healthy distance, between the art and the artist,” shares St. Silva. “This is a document, a marker of where I was during a moment of time and the sounds that inspired me.”
An overwhelming sense of calm envelops the listener immediately, as “And the Catbird Sings” combines the warm twinkle of electric piano, sustained synths, and that ever-present sound of nature: mostly birds and the breeze. The sounds gently build over a few minutes before slowly dissolving; the track is one big sweep of momentum. The title, incidentally, refers to the grey catbird. Cooley helpfully includes the names of all the birds recorded on Forager in the album’s credits.
Like that first track, most songs on Forager seem to rise gradually, establishing a mood—usually gentle and serene—before gently retreating. “Somewhere in Between” adds layers of mystery: the main sonic entity combines horn swells, backwards guitar notes, and field recordings, but the final section brings in a sustained organ or harmonium sound, as if Cooley is experimenting with variations on his established themes.
“Blue Heron” is another song named after one of the recorded birds, with the sound of creek water as the primary backdrop. Deeply reverberated electric piano notes play against each other and gradually dissolve into the soft noise of synthesizers. Meanwhile, as in nature, the water remains, continuing after the instruments are gone. Forager also gets playful with soft, interlocking synthesizer melodies that weave in and out of the birdsong on “Here Alone”.
Other highlights include the dark, almost abrasive keyboard swells that dominate “Halations”, the infectious, percussion-fueled “Sun Flies”, and the deeply serene “Something Strange”, which combines simple, heavily treated upright piano notes with the insistent lilt of rainfall. With 12 tracks of considerable variety, Forager establishes its intended mood without ever overstaying any one path or arrangement style. The songs all seem to embody the same basic vibe, but with enough variety to keep it consistently engaging and listenable.
The definition of “forage” is “to search widely for food or supplies. “Sometimes playing music feels like that,” Cooley explains. “More an act of discovering something than creating something.” The sense of discovery on Forager is deep and palpable, and the album repeatedly fuses technology with nature with elegant ease.