“A lot of broken synths in the studio are great - but on tour? Not so much,” laughs Robbie Bennett, solo artist and longtime keyboardist and multi-instrumentalist with Philadelphia indie rockers The War on Drugs.
Robbie is speaking from his home studio where his new solo albums, Steloken and Circulation, were both sketched, performed and recorded. He joined the Grammy-Award-winning War on Drugs around 2010, making his recorded debut on 2011’s Slave Ambient, and has since dedicated himself to providing keyboards and guitars for the increasingly beloved seven-piece, led by vocalist/guitarist Adam Granduciel.
Robbie’s two new solo albums follow his self-released 2020 debut Permanent World and The War on Drugs’ recent single Who’s That, their first new music in four years.
In this latest artist chapter, Robbie’s solo tracks move between more subtle atmospheres and hazy electronic textures than the sky-scraping psychedelia of the band he usually plays with. After capturing myriad ideas on his phone, he took them into the studio where he toyed and teased them into recorded forms.
Robbie is modest about his talents and never anticipated that the American Dream label would back a double release.
“The label has been so supportive,” Robbie says. “I mentioned that I’d made this other record while playing them the first collection of songs and thought I’d just put them out via Bandcamp. But they insisted on releasing everything at the same time. I thought it sounded insane but I’m excited that they convinced me it was a good idea.”
Originally conceived as one album, the musical architecture of Steloken and Circulation grew out of the keyboard rig Robbie uses with The War on Drugs.
Burrowed in his home studio, he sent MIDI from an acoustic player piano into an Oberheim OB-X8 synthesizer, allowing both instruments to play simultaneously. He would then build the records layer by layer in real time, incorporating piano, synths, Fender Rhodes, vocoder, and a Soma Terra, a wooden, almost tree-bark-esque polyphonic microtonal synth with a gyroscope and pressure-sensitive sensors for gesture control.
“I started recording and playing through some of the ideas I had committed to my phone without really thinking too much about it,” says Robbie of his initial process. “I had recorded five of the tunes before realising it started to sound good and hang together - maybe I would never have started if I’d known I was doing what turned out to be a record. I wasn’t thinking too much about the listener, I was just having fun making sounds.”
While his tech palette was deliberately limited, the OBX was a synth he had “lusted over for a while” after hearing how Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood used it on some of his screen and film soundtrack work.
“The real thing that happened when I was playing was this idea of chaining the MIDI out of the piano into the synth,” he says. “I could play a synth, use a lot of reverbs and listen to it bloom as it held, then decay before I made my next move. It meant I really considered each step and gave every element a lot of space.”
The wooden Soma Terra is one of the more esoteric pieces of kit Robbie utilised, picking one up from the Perfect Circuit synth store in Burbank while working on recording with The War on Drugs.
“It’s really cool, I saw it first when Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders did this beautiful record together and they played a show at Hollywood Bowl with this big band,” he says. “I had seen this behind the scenes footage and I think Kieran [Hebden] from Four Tet was playing one with an orchestral set up. I thought I just had to have one, it looked so wild.
“I wanted to get something super out there and see what it inspires within me. I brought it into the studio with the band, everyone thought it was insane but I was mainly mocked for having it. ‘Who comes in here with a tree stump? Can you play some keyboards, man?’”
Its ease of use and expressive capabilities are what Robbie loves about the synth, and how it is capable of adding an element of tension and chaos to his music.
“It’s so intuitive, your pressure influences it, you can change the pitch just by wobbling it around,” he explains. “It opens up an expressive musical world I wanted to get into. It can also be easy to get into a lot of mistakes with it too, sometimes you want to have something that can inspire you like this.”
“I like the idea of playing something really beautiful on the piano, then having this in the mix. It doesn’t make my music more dissonant, it makes something pretty more beautiful.”
Although the music on Steloken and Circulation sounds like it was born out of a love for film scores and left-field records, Robbie wanted to avoid nodding to any specific wells of inspiration. His relationship with music is more about soaking up as much as he can and not being overly precious.
“As a scholar of music, I’m not very scholarly,” he says. “I have listened to the entire canon of ambient and jazz - but if you asked me to name a few songs off Abbey Road I’d probably have a meltdown, I wouldn’t be able to do it.”
“I absorb everything I hear and translate it back via my fingers, this is how I’ve always liked to communicate,” Robbie continues. “I don’t do many interviews as I’m not a man of many words. But all these limitations, they help you use your ears and how you listen, I think a lot more about music and how I want to experience it.”
When you’re recording as a band, the studio process can often involve each member of a group creatively provoking each other. On this latest project, Robbie leaned on his hardware as additional collaborators.
“The Soma Terra was a way for me to create this chaos in real time and react to it,” he says. “With all of the pieces, it was running the piano into the synth, I’d flick a switch or change a patch on the synth, I’d see what that would do. Having something to respond to like this was really cool.”
Although his music is piano-led, leading him into ambient and electronic pastures, Robbie also likes his music to be free too. As he says, he prefers his music to “wander off and explore.”
“I’m a claustrophobic guy, when I go to the supermarket, I will park my car far from the entrance so I’m not near anyone, and that’s how my music is too,” Robbie smiles.
“It’s not that I don’t want familiar themes to repeat, I do - but I don’t like it on a loop and my gear has let me do this. If I was utilising looping pedals, I’d be making different records. I think the amount of chaos and the way these records react and decay is really great for me.”
Robbie’s studio is also in his home, and he likes how his domestic life has stumbled into the backdrop of these recordings.
“On both these albums, there are funny moments when you can hear my dogs running around or the tumble driers beeping, all this kind of stuff.”
There are particular highlights in terms of tunes too. On Steloken, the fifth track - System of Warmth, Collection of Jackets - represents the moment when he first found the album’s pulse.
“I started playing and it felt like the synths had taken over, on this long improvised piece where the record’s world opened up to me,” Robbie explains. “On Circulation, a track called Vermiculite starts out with a vocoder, it’s almost like it has this vocal performance and allowed me to play with a different palette that still relates to everything else.”
Joining the War on Drugs in 2010 has meant Robbie has spent a large amount of time on the road and in the studio, honing his skills and investing time in the craft of songwriting and production. With the band he's helped to create the majority of their studio albums discography, including Slave Ambient (2011), the much-adored Lost in the Dream (2014), A Deeper Understanding (2017) and 2021's I Don't Live Here Anymore.
“When I started touring with them, it was a four-piece outfit, there was no one else playing keyboards and their records were becoming known for these lush ambient soundscapes,” he says. “I had to figure out how to bring this to the tour, all of a sudden, my tiny little piano had to become this huge workstation.”
Being in the group has also meant Robbie has been exposed to numerous great talents and experts, from his bandmates to engineers like Shawn Everett. As he prepares to take his own music out into a live setting, he suggests there is another album in the works from The War on Drugs. His experiences with them have also added depth to his knowledge of the recording process.
“For any new artists, you always need to pay attention to what is happening in all corners of the studio,” he says. “Being in the band and spending so much time in the studio over the years has really shown me how things work.
“Famously, The War on Drugs spend years on records. Sometimes there are 90 versions of a song, but it can be the first one where the spark stuck,” Robbie continues.
“Knowing what makes something special or when the soul has left its body is part of music making too. As a solo musician working in the basement, I had to know when something was right. Sometimes, it’s like going to a casino, you play the table and win right away. If you get something in the first take, I always think it’s best to leave it alone and let the song live. Instead, you can go outside and get some fresh air.”
Steloken and Circulation are released on 11th December by American Dreams. For more information head here.
