We Are All Here; A new record by David Benjamin Blower

Here is a conversation David and I recorded to celebrate the release of his new album, We Are All Here. Let us know what you make of it! Find the album here on vinyl, cd and digital download. Buy a copy and help David buy us a mansion where we can host friends and artists and good things. Thanks!

The age to come is beneath your feet

hidden in the soil where nobody planted it.

The first time I met David he barely said a word. His form crumpled inwards, wrapped around a cup of coffee. The group was meeting for the first time and I lightly, though inevitably accurately, read everyone as extroverts; arms flung open, immediate chatter, more questions before the last answer had been given. David became my introverted comrade, regularly beginning the day with shared silence in the garden before the day’s work. He would listen to discussion - his body entirely still in a room of wild gesticulations. I’d never seen listening quite like this - with all his senses and all his cells. He was the person that could sketch a summary of the day’s debate that would fit on the head of the pin. He was the person that would ask a question that would slice through, across and beyond the ground we’d covered so far. And always with genuine curiosity, kindness and care. I have never thought of David as a quiet person. He has always been cacophonous. Polyphonic.

This is an event.

This is a happening.

When asked to define paradise, Johnny Cash famously replied: “This morning, with her, having coffee.” Our first coffee of the day is sacred; times a million, when we’re in the same place. David’s last words of the day have been known to be ‘We get to wake up and drink coffee together tomorrow” and the excitement is real. So imagine a morning where I feel his thoughts wandered before caffeine - Where I note that there is something ahead of him that coffee is in the way of. I have watched David make music for joy, I have watched him make music for money, and then I have watched him be a lightening rod for this album. At times I’ve had to know when to get out of the way. At times I think he has too.

Shall we be undone?

“I’m not a very good musician” he says, and my index finger tingles. Some years ago, we noticed that I have a tendency to put my finger on the tip of my nose when I’m displeased. ‘Not the nose!’ he’ll say, usually resulting in raucous laughter and completely forgetting whatever the clash was. There’s a microphone right there, so I lightly grip my trousers to stop my finger floating up to my nose. I don’t manage to get in the way of pursed lips and widened eyes. He sees, laughs, then describes himself as a sculptor; someone able to make a thousand decisions that shape the pieces in front of him towards a vision or a feeling. I was glad, if a little surprised. Finally we have recorded evidence of my decade-long knowing: David is an artist in every sense of the word.

Where there are feet upon the earth there is a village hall.

For three years, I visited David in a single room in a house of multiple occupancy. For more than six years, there have been 120 miles between our front doors. Arriving was and is always an occasion to me, but arriving to this space was often hard. I felt new to the city and now we were in a house of parallel strangers. My circulation could only manage short visits in the winter. The bathroom was not a place to unwind or leave feeling clean. The best of the summer days felt like camping with a roof - We’d fling the uPVC doors open, letting in any breeze and the sound of neighbour’s toddler in fits of giggles in the garden. There are fond memories of that time, and we choose to keep remembering them, but in hindsight I know we worked hard in those years. Life orientated around the futon; a shape shifting place we slept, sat, chatted, ate. A squeeze for the four of us, when the kids were over.

David writes and writes and writes before he reaches for any instrument. He knows the words first. On many occasions, we would share this single room, both absorbed in our own tasks. When the time came for him to yell into a microphone, I would take a walk around the park, being sure to greet the great pines: Pistis, Elpis and Agape. Half the time I’d come home with handfuls of foraged leaves for a salad. David might already have his headphones on by the time I get back, listening to the last hours’ recordings and roughly mixing them. We’d pause to eat lunch together, crossing our legs on the futon and letting it cradle us both in the middle of the day. A vessel. He’d tell me all about the new plugin he’s downloaded that does exactly what he wants it to do. I’d ask for more detail than I really wanted, just to prolong his beaming.

A year after David moved out of the room, we visited friends on Jersey. Three of us stole away from the group activities to visit St Helier’s hermitage. The magical cave-like studio at the top of a precarious, stony staircase is said to have been home to a hermit named Helier in the 6th century. It is stark and sharp and jagged and grey, but I could feel its sense of home. Maybe I’d learned something about how a small, inhospitable space could hold you. David and I instinctively crawled into the space’s only nook and burst out laughing. Cradled in the middle of the day. I’ll always be grateful that our friend was there to take a photograph.

Don’t look at me now like there are no choices.

I call David ‘Beautiful man’. I call his son ‘Beautiful boy’. I don’t know if they hear it anymore, but I will continue for as long as they let me. What hurts me in the world hurts them too. I see them stretch themselves in invisible ways, sometimes not even known to them, to maintain their softness; their innate kindness, overwhelming empathy and animal body. I am often undone by David’s beauty. I am occasionally confronted by my hidden, harder edges - grown from perceived necessity - and invited to risk letting them compost. I think I offer him parallel invitations, in a different voice, at other times.

Come on down from your lofty towers

from your wearing grind, from your wasted hours.

Last week I went to see Testament and collaborator Matthew Bourne set the words of Innocence and Experience to music. David set the same words to very different music some years ago - Two men I admire, filtering the same references through different lenses. I’m sitting in seat E6 in the City Varieties music hall, central Leeds, and it’s filling up fast. It’s a stunning venue; all red velvet seats, gilded angels wrapped around the rafters. In sixteen years I’ve sat here many times -for musicians, comedians, choirs, panels - and it’s never not special. I take in the room, then individual faces. Oh, it’s Jamie. It’s Harry. It’s Becky and Khadijah and Henry. We’re older. These are my peers of the last sixteen years. The faces I’ve seen at gallery openings, scratch performances, street takeovers, protests, community meals. And here we are, doing what we’ve always done: Buying tickets and showing up to see each others’ art. Yes, we’ve spent cash on a seat, this time. But I remember all the other resources exchanged; free rehearsal space, good listening, purposeful introductions, bottomless encouragement, discount codes, leftover materials, emergency sandwiches. It takes a village.

Here is a marching band, heralding universes.

I have listened to this record hundreds of times. These sounds know my river, all the skies, all the weather; inner and outer. And I can say with confidence - When the world is paved over and airless, give me these songs. When my body is floating solo, unsupported and directionless, hand them to me; feed me them straight and watch the oxygen return to my face. Watch what I’m capable of with oxygen in my face. I’ll smash concrete til I reach earth, pushing into its nutrient density with my toes until my I am planted here. Tell me art isn’t nourishment. Tell me you can’t live on sound, image and imagination alone. For the length of this record, I won’t believe you.

I hear all corners of David in this record. I love them all. I hear myself. I hear us and our morning coffee. I hear my friends, my communities, our greatest hopes; the best and worst of all I see, hear and sense. I hear roots and vantage points and long, dirt tracks. I want to travel them all a hundred times over.

Down, down the river all, all to where it’s flowing.

It is as it was and it will be and you will know it.