Eugene, OR 10/25/18 — Oregon multi-instrumentalist and experimental songwriter Ben Swisher a.k.a Sen Wisher is releasing his third studio album, “Bird Languages,” which responds to three years of dark, alluvial emotions by taking you birdwatching along the Willamette River. It leaves its nest on November 23rd.
With lyrics built from personal journals and google-translated texts, each representing a topography of disorienting and forest-sized feelings, “Bird Languages” takes on the weight and scale of a modern mythology.
The album’s soundscape is many-feathered. Bedroom hymns at an organ slowly take flight. Frustrated drums dissolve into jubilant brass. A viola soars above the birdsong of self-talk below. Bristling nylon strings conjure cross-stitched drones. It’s an intricate vector folk, eagle-eye’d-power-trance, and radio interference from the aviary just down the street.
Ben Swisher grew up in the Pacific Northwest and currently spends his days recording the natural sounds of Eugene. He’s performed with the Eugene Symphony and the Deseret Experimental Opera Company, and been commissioned to write scores for Eric Edvalson’s convenience store ode “Cozy Mart” and a ballet about animal courtship rituals for Roxanne Gray’s “Pair.”
His personal output is equally prolific — “Bird Languages” makes for three albums in two years, joined by the bedroom-produced “Belief Society” and the previous Sen Wisher release, the appliance-harmonizing “Vacuum Sing” featuring friends Emily Brown and Lindenfield.
Bird Languages was created in March of this year, at Studio Studio Dada in Provo by Stephen Cope, Stuart Wheeler and Ben Swisher. It was mastered at The Unknown in Anacortes by Nich Wilbur.