Ben Cooper of Electric President, Radical Face, and Patients
Some artists find it appropriate to give roots to their musical plurality by releasing music under multiple band names. Ben Cooper of Jacksonville Beach, Florida, has embraced this approach, and it seems that he’s unable to stop the flood of songwriting ideas. He writes under three band names: Electric President, Radical Face, and Patients, each project offering different angles to explore songwriting.
Earlier this year Ben Cooper and Alex Kane released The Violent Blue under the name of Electric President. We’ve been enjoying this release, their third album as Electric President, released on Fake Four Inc, and the more I listen to it the more I really dig their subtle soundscape arrangements. If you enjoy Say Hi then I’m confident you’ll enjoy Electric President. Most recently, Ben Cooper and Mark Hubbard produced a music video for the title track on The Violent Blue, filmed during a dark night at a sandy Florida beach.
Radical Face is a moniker that Ben Cooper writes and records as, more or less, a solo project. His debut album for Radical Face was released in 2007, Ghost, on Morr Music, a fitting label for Radical Face. Ben is currently working on an interesting set of three albums with a story-line running through the three albums that he began writing in 2007.
The next three Radical Face albums centers around a fictional family, spanning 1800 to 1950. Ben has worked out a fictional family tree for this family, the Northcotes, and wrote roughly forty songs about this family. The first album, The Family Tree: The Roots, is now complete and is purposefully less produced than the forthcoming two albums. This will be followed by The Branches and The Relatives, each will have a progressively more produced sound than the previous as the albums advance in the time period.
Ben Cooper set guidelines for the new Radical Face albums before he began recording The Roots. He explained on his blog, “I chose from that the start that first record would revolve around 4 instruments: piano, acoustic guitar, voices and a floor tom (the main source of percussion). There are some flourishes beyond these instruments when the song called for it (strings, banjos, etc), but those four were the things each of the songs were actually written on.”
A third moniker that Ben Cooper works under is Patients, created as an avenue to give away his music. You can download the Patients debut album for free on Musicfloss. He has also begun working on a new Patients album, but with a unique approach. Setting out to record a new song every month, Ben will release each new song for free (on Musicfloss). But what makes this album (a term used loosely) is how Ben will gather subject material for Patients: Volume 2.
“For subject matter, I would like to hear stories from people. Anyone out there who is reading this and has a story they think would be an interesting subject for a song. It could be autobiographical, or something that happened to someone you know, or something you read in a newspaper, or complete fiction (though, I’d prefer these were based on true events). I just like stories, all kinds, and while I have plenty of my own, I think it would be really fun to have them provided by people I don’t personally know. To just be surprised by them.”
Check out RadicalFace.com for more information about Ben Cooper and his many projects.
Electric Presidents – The Violent Blue