Build Buildings - Hebei Victory

Build Buildings (New York producer Ben Tweel) returns with Glass, a concise and determined 4-song EP of songs that subtly explore time signature, rhythm and song structure, without losing sight of the melody and mood that define his earlier releases. As Textura described the sound, “If there's one thing that primarily distances Tweel's tracks from the clicks'n'cuts tradition, it's his focus on melody and song structure.... There's no shortage of whirr and click within a given Build Buildings piece, but such elements are deployed in the service of the song...that just happens to be assembled from found sounds and treated samples.” These immediately captivating songs do just as well in the living room as in headphones, but close listeners are rewarded. Music nerds may notice polyrhythms, microtones and a gentle disregard for traditional Western 4-bar repetition, but this isn’t music that comes across as “challenging.” Hebei Victory and Honey Locust are melodic mood-setters. Glass explores the rhythms within rhythms that arise from slowly slipping loops. Cedilla’s propulsive, head-nodding beat is written in an Ableton-be-damned 7/8 time signature. Build Buildings is perhaps most well-known these days for providing music for the Gimlet Media podcasts Reply All and StartUp, but his music has also been featured on radio, television and motion picture soundtracks (including NBC’s World of Adventure Sports; National Public Radio’s Radiolab and On the Media; and feature documentary Valley Uprising).