Street Druid

Ben Vince plays his saxophone like a man with one foot in another dimension. His tone is searching, mystical, molten; his penchant for looping and layering evokes blurry shapes emerging from a thick mist. No stave could contain him: Even the sweetest tone might peel off into a harried bleat. If the wind instrument’s magic is to turn breath into seemingly solid form, Vince is just as likely to wrest a stray note as it passes across his reed and dissolve it back into air.

On his early records, the London musician made do with saxophone alone, looping and layering his instrument into billowing expressions of foghorn melancholy. He cut a profoundly romantic figure: One imagined him out wandering the heath, half shrouded in fog, braving the elements or perhaps summoning them—an impression furthered by his wild hair and wilder beard, as though his horn were capable of creating weather systems no comb could withstand.

After those stark affairs, Vince tentatively began coming in from the cold. His 2018 album Assimilation collected collaborations with artists like Mica Levi, Rupert Clervaux, and Valentina Magaletti, each one a kind of provisional architecture—a temporary shelter forged from what was at hand, without frills. A series of collaborative experiments followed: I’ll Stick Around, a set of unadorned duets with pianist Jacob Samuel; Don’t Give Your Life, which ranged across free jazz, gaseous spoken word, and industrial trip-hop in tandem with Bianca Scout, Kenta Sekine, Alpha Maid, and others; and There I See Everything, a temple erected around the voice of Karelian-Luxembourgish musician Cucina Povera.

Vince’s new album, Street Druid, gives the impression of a city in sound. It is sturdier and more imposing than anything he has done to date. And while his tone remains intractable, impossible to pin down—here a will-o’-the-wisp, there a gale-force wind—the structures he builds around it have never felt more elaborate or enduring.

Aside from drummer Moses Boyd on two tracks and a scrap of guitarist T. Morgz in the outro of another, Street Druid is all Vince—saxophone, synthesizer, guitars, drum machine, and, on one track, vocals. The album begins as if in medias res, a sustained cluster of tones suggesting we have just walked in on a concert in progress. Countless individual saxophone parts weave together, distributing the melodic line across different voices; his repeating patterns move like wheeling seagulls, a flashback to his early work, but the intricate counterpoints and bellowing bass tones feel new to his repertoire.

The vision expands with “Peace Spell,” among the most song-like pieces in his catalog, where plucked harp and glowing synths lay the foundation for a lyrical saxophone melody. Vince sounds more sentimental than on past recordings, but despite the music’s prettiness, it’s hardly a walk in the park; the lightness of the harp is counterposed with the sorrowful weight of his horn’s tone. The weight intensifies on “Deepbluereflection,” which builds a lumbering electronic beat out of a smudge of bass, drainpipe clank, and an answering handclap; Vince’s saxophone, wadded into a tuft of steel wool, is pushed to the margins, where it makes way for a funky wah-wah guitar line. Miles Davis’ electric funk comes to mind in the song’s cool strutting rhythms and confident swagger. This isn’t really “dance music” by any conventional metric, but it moves like a heaving room full of bodies.

The remainder of the album builds on ideas floated in those first three tracks, and it turns particularly intense on the B-side. “Sentient Interlude” begins with more of Vince’s customarily ethereal clouds, but a skeletal drum pattern gives it heft before “Sentient Kinetics” wraps the same saxophone lines around industrial-grade bass and drums, adding and discarding loops with abandon. In its cellular makeup, the song is reminiscent of Terry Riley’s In C—but informed by sludge metal’s low end and the kinds of rhythms you might encounter on Nyege Nyege Tapes or Príncipe Discos.

It all comes surging to a climax on “(Ride a) Wave,” an even heavier fusion of frantic sax patterns and programmed drums, before Vince eases off with the closing “Longville,” the lone track to prominently feature his own slightly quavering vocals. It’s a risky choice: Compared with the sheer force of his playing and arrangements, his singing comes across a little like a deflating balloon. But here’s the funny thing: For my first dozen listens, I inadvertently played the album’s tracks in alphabetical order, and every time “Longville” turned up, it stuck out like a sore thumb. I had a nagging sense that something was out of whack, but once I realized the error and resequenced the album, everything fell into place; even the plaintive “Longville” suddenly made sense as the downcast denouement to the record’s carefully shaped arc. It’s a testament to Vince’s compositional skills that Street Druid flows the way it does—one wrong gust could blow the whole thing down, but he clearly knows something about harnessing the power of air.