According to Ben Rellick, Monopolyopolis is an experiment in how many o’s you can fit in a band name.
But in reality, the instrumental solo project is an experiment in much more than that. The project, headed solely by Rellick, had been toying around with multiple combinations of sounds and textures for about a year and half before releasing his first official album, Reorient, on March 1st.
Calling the album a “vague idea”, Rellick would sit down with a guitar, drum machine, synthesizer, and loop pedal to experiment with different combinations of layers until he was happy with the form it had taken. But for a year and a half, he would record, wait, and scrap the tracks, unsatisfied with how they would eventually develop.
An artist’s perfectionism is nothing new – it’s often that one scraps a project after looking at it for too long, even if an onlooker says it’s perfect. While Rellick wasn’t too satisfied with how things were looking, he said he loved some of the tracks he produced and did know he wanted to release something sooner rather than later. He had scheduled a trip to Australia, which he said acted as a deadline for the album and motivated him to follow through.
And it did, having released it right before embarking on his journey down under. Despite being somewhere around 9,000 miles away, Rellick still made time to speak with us at RVAMag, at about 1 AM EST – and still writes and records music as best he can while there.
Monopolyoplis first started with Rellick borrowing a looping pedal from a friend about two years back. While once limited to what one traditionally can do with instruments and recording gear, the new options to layer and loop different sounds opened up the ability to play complex solo songs live and widened the scope of what he could do and what his work could sound like.
“All of the sudden I was going from strumming a couple riffs to being able to put together like 12 layers all at the same time. A lot of the time, I’ll start with a simple loop and just let it run like for 15 or 20 minutes and go back over it and keep trying different a bunch of them,” said Rellick. “If something happens to sound alright, I’ll record that and then right after try go back and dissect and pull out different parts so I can actually remember and play it again.”
While clearly experimental, Rellick seems to pay special attention to all that he does in a sort of methodological and minimalistic way. His sound is something of a cross between instrumental indie-rock and light hip hop. If you listen closely, it all comes across much more organized in nature for something that comes about so organically, far from something like an experimental jam band.
According to Rellick, the process of writing and recording a song is almost meditative. Letting the loops play for 15 to 20 minutes, he would “get sucked into it” and wouldn’t realize six or seven hours had gone by.
Though the loop pedal widens his ability to experiment and develop his sound in a more versatile way, Rellick still wanted to reach the full extent of what he could do, which meant compromising on what he could perform live – something he says was an intentional choice, but one that also tested his creativity.
“I think there’s value in having songs where you put together all the parts, you released them on whatever format, and if you can’t do them live, y’know… whatever. It was nice having the restriction that I would have to reproduce and recreate these songs live,” said Rellick.
Though the project is young, Rellick has been surrounded by music in his current town of Harrisonburg. A Richmond native, Rellick’s lived in Harrisonburg for a about six years after attending JMU. While many of us think that Harrisonburg is just a rural area with JMU parked in the middle, it’s gained a lot of credibility via it’s growing and supportive music scene that Rellick is a part of. It’s also become a stopping point for RVA bands as they embark west or south on tour.
At one point, Rellick lived in a house made up entirely of musicians – you might recognize his past roommates as the genre-defying experimental project Zooanzoo and others from local acts Earthling and Flyying Colors.
According to Rellick, it was a great place to be creatively; he could hear music flowing from different parts of the house most any time. It’s even inspired some collaboration between them.
“There’s some stuff in some of these songs – I did a demo of one of these songs, and Zach [from Zooanzoo] sampled it and remixed it, and then the version that ended up on the album I took some cues from, like some of the stuff that he did the remix on, which was really cool. Trading the song back and forth,” he said.
Rellick also named Harrisonburg-based indie duo Illiterate Light as an inspiration for his own sound.
“They’re probably my favorite band from the area currently,” said Rellick. “I feel like we’re both trying to tackle that challenge of trying to do more with less. So I’m always taking notes from Jeff’s pedalboard whenever I see them, just trying to figure how the heck they’re doing what they’re doing.”
Moreover, Rellick has been inspired by other kinds media. One of the first things you notice on Reorient are unique track titles – some one words, some more intriguing and long. The track, “It Was A Peculiar Moment, But So Explicit As To Suggest Nothing Beyond Itself”, was a quote he jotted down from a book he was reading called What Technology Wants. The words were used to describe the experience of listening to the captivating noise a two-story dam turbine made – so immense, no one had anything to say about it.
Rellick noted that the beauty of instrumental music is that you can name the tracks whatever you want, something that he even did with the project title.
“I was playing a show, someone was like, ‘Hey what’s it called?’ and I was like ‘Oh, looks like I have to come up with something’”, he said through laughter. “Similar with picking up the song names, it was something my friend Heidi said back in like 2013. I don’t remember what the context was. I like it because it doesn’t have any connotation.”
Despite that the naming and formal titles for the project came about as sort of a second thought, the titles drawn one in regardless. Rellick’s work often seems to be more intentional than not – and seems that, as a musician, adapts to the environment that he’s in. Having participated in Harrisonburg’s Super Gr8 Film Festival, Rellick created short videos using Super 8 film format by shooting still shots sequentially and writing music to his memories of the scenes and landscapes. The result was a chill yet short and choppy sound that mirrored the film. And Rellick is still writing songs in Melbourne, which he said has made him work around limitations produced by traveling as well.
“Recently, with traveling around, I can’t really have a guitar or amp or drums or anything, so it’s all been trending more towards sampled stuff…” said Rellick. “I’ve been trying to…I was hoping to get enough to put a little bit of something together, I only have like three songs that I’m pretty happy with, but again they’re all only a minute each and you gotta have a handful of them.”
While obviously not able to play shows at the current moment, Rellick plans to line up live shows when he gets back towards the end of the summer that you can look forward to. For now, check out <em>Reorient on Monopolyopolis’ bandcamp and chill.
