your secret admirer

ben boye

haha 2

HAHA is proud to bring you the first solo piano outing of ben boye. recorded in february 2021. it is presented here on cassette with letterpressed details and assembled by hand at HAHA headquarters, los angeles, ca.

“to say this record has been a long time coming would be assuming that ben boye works on a similar plane of time management as the rest of modern civilization. as a close friend and musical comrade of ben’s for the better parts of the past 15 odd years, i can say that his new solo offering is nothing short of a dream come true. ben is a unique musical voice. many people have had the pleasure of seeing him perform around the world alongside countless others. few have seen him on his own. and we have all been asking him forever, “ben! where is yr piano album?!” as for many of us, the notion of recording something like this brings to question a far more esoteric quandary on the nature of recording. the common view of a recording—that it is the culminating moment in a musical piece’s development or execution—will often serve, in the minds of artists like ben, to indefinitely delay or even prevent its arrival to the ears of the world. His aim with composition is to create something that, like most things, is always evolving. whether or not recordings strive to be an example of a moment frozen in a process (because like it or not, this is in fact what a recording is!), this idea of the definitive version of a piece being present on a record presents this impossible challenge of going against the entire point of this type of composing. sharing lives with ben in many varied incarnations, i know that it may be possible for such a recording to exist only if the appropriate vortex should appear. the recording presented here contains two instances of where ben’s piece your secret admirer is at the moment. next time you hear it, be it in person or as another recording, the piece will be somewhere else—and it will continue in this fashion forever. as will you, its receiver, be elsewhere.  thankfully haha is here to provide this vortex for you and Ben to begin cohabitation. may there be many others!” -emmett kelly

cassette out of stock

cd out of stock