Ben Bondy on Aliases, Anti-Growth, and Guiding the Dancefloor

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Earlier this year, Ben Bondy released one of the best records of the year by my measure, XO Salt Llif3—an impressively dreamy and emotional left-turn for the producer who's become known over the years for a variety of aliases zeroing in on myriad subgenres of ambient and dance music. I hopped on a call with Ben earlier this month to talk through this monumental achievement as well as his overall artistic approach, and it was an extremely fascinating and enlightening conversation that I'm happy to share with all of you today. Check it out:

You put out a lot of music—but even so, this record is a pretty big left turn for you sonically.
I'd been edging towards this for a while—teasing a lot of these ideas throughout different aliases and projects. I really did start my journey as a singer-songwriter, playing in bands starting when I was 13 or 14 and doing local shows in Jersey. The scene was really lit, honestly. Tons of kids were putting together shows, and me and my friends were throwing shows by the time we were 11 years old. My friend lived in the parish house of this church in my town, and his dad was like, "Yeah, you guys can do stuff here if you'd like to."

I was playing in screamo bands, booking local bands and sometimes having bigger bands come through. By the time I was in my late teens and early 20s, I moved to upstate New York to go to school and I was playing in bands there. By the time I moved to [NYC] in 2014, I was still playing in bands. I was always writing songs, and when I stopped playing in bands, I felt like the pacing of playing in a band wasn't really working for me anymore.

Revisiting and listening to some of my older releases that are very much on this compositional ambient tip, I was very interested in synthesis and sound design, and applying those ideas to the sounds and inspiration that I'd been gathering from being in the noise scene. A lot of the club influences that I started picking up when I moved to New York, I was also trying to apply to compositional ambient stuff.

There was a distinct moment a few years ago, when I was first starting to tour in 2021. I was playing these church gigs in Montreal, and all I could think about was choral and vocal music, and how the rooms are designed specifically for vocals. That's when I started teasing and sampling pop vocals, lyrics, and melodies and applying other vocals on them. I'd been using sampling as a big model of my communication with music, but going from playing in bands to shifting my focus towards production took me to that place.

Right when I started touring and traveling for shows, I also weirdly started getting back in touch with songwriting again, because I'd kind of lost touch with that while living in New York and trying to get my life started. Once I picked up production, I really just lost myself in that, and once I started parallel-pathing these practices of mine, it really coalesced into these side projects and aliases—like my project Kevin with my friend Mister Water Wet out in Kansas City. We started writing our record Laundry in 2021. crash830 was my little project that I started as my homage to my barista life—I'm waking up, all these customers come in and crash the spot at 8:30, and I'm just vibing to music. I wanted to start making the music that I wanted to hear when I was waking up in the morning. Once I was doing the k2dj stuff that I was singing in, I realized that there were these moments where the aliases were blurring together into one thing.

This record exploded out of me during a really emotionally and physically massive period of upheaval in my life. I was making music, touring, parallel-pathing those things, and then all of a sudden I was leaving New York, packing all my things up. I dipped abruptly after spending a couple of years on the road and moved back in with my family for a month. I didn't really have anywhere to go. My dad plays in a cover band—he's a Jersey rocker dude, he plays bass, and his band practices in the basement—and I just didn't really have anything to do with myself, so I ended up recording most of the instruments and producing the record while chilling at my parents' house in Jersey. It became this crazy thing that I felt like I could really lose myself in. I moved to Philly for six months last winter, and I ended up writing the rest of the lyrics between Philly and wherever I was traveling at that moment.

At first, I was gonna put it out as k2dj, since it fits where that project is going. You hear people talk about ambient music being healing and comforting, and to me what felt the most comforting in my own practice was getting lost in this process of writing songs and lyrics. The combination of this life upheaval and this really rare moment of reflection on what had brought me to this point led me to this very holistic approach to making this album. That really helped me not only tap in like emotionally to what I wanted to do, but also explore all these creature comfort sounds and inspirations.

Process-wise, I was getting really deeply inspired by the ethos of getting lost in world-building. I can't really say that I intentionally meant to make this record, but it felt like everything led to this record happening. It's really interesting for me now, because I feel very tapped in to producing and writing songs, and since then I've obviously been writing a ton of songs and performing those tracks out live. But it still feels like another shade of who I am—of making music as Ben Bondy. It just poured out of me into this moment.

When it comes to playing notions of persona and alias, is that something you want to continue doing in the future, or does this mark a major shift in terms of how you do things in general?
Honestly, it's the one thing that's really got me feeling a bit stuck. Once I felt like I had started building an audience, all I could think about was breaking these expectations. Against all odds, no matter what I was doing, people were like, "Oh, ambient producer." I can't tell if sometimes I just make music to be contrarian to certain ideas or schools of thought, but it's always been this thing where I'm like, "Okay, what does this mean to me right now?" With those church shows, I was like, "Who do i want to challenge? Who's coming to my gigs?" It was a lot of people that are very discerning listeners, and something that felt very challenging was actually confronting people with cringe music, or with these ideas of what people think of as "Guilty pleasures." To me, there's no such thing. If it means something to you, if it touches you, it's not a guilty pleasure.

I'm not saying it was a moment when I made this record where I was like, "Okay, this is distinctly what I want to do now with this project." This, for the past few years, has been something that I've been teasing in various projects—indie ideas, playing on more cloud rap shit that I've been inspired by, music I hear at the grocery store or bumping out of people's cars. Those traces and inspirations—whatever I'm tapped into—are always there.

For me, making music is almost like a tic. It's something I'm constantly doing, and while right now I'm still working on more structured and formal songwriting stuff, I'm constantly working in these multiple modalities that are constantly feeding into each other, inspiration-wise. It's interesting, because at the moment I'm still touring and playing gigs under my name, but I'm also very interested in exploring some new aliases. I've also gotten back into collaborating a lot again—and, obviously, this record was massively a collaborative record. It felt important to put it out under my name. I don't really know where that project goes, per se. But this record feels like such an interesting cohesion of a lot of things that I've had to say that, over the past year, I've been like, "Okay, now how do I defy that?"

The other thing that feels challenging is re-confronting feelings in aliases and collaborative projects. Ben Bondy became this thing for me where I'm operating as this kind of anonymous artist under my own name, and trying to express it as being very personal and intimate, yet also publicly-interacted-with. For me, challenging myself is taking these things that I've built up and tried to fight against—these feelings of wanting to hide myself behind and disappear into music—and become whoever I want to be. There's part of me that feels more open and public to wanting to share these more direct ways of communicating musically. At the same time, it feels very important for me to approach music again from a more private or obscured place as well.

You mentioned going through this period of upheaval while making this record. When you posted about its release on Instagram, you described it as "a place I found to hide and heal my wounds." I'd love to hear you go more into what you were dealing with, and how making this record helped you move forward.
I'd just come off of a period of my life where I was juggling all of these things and, quite frankly, had too much going on in my life on a personal and emotional level—a constant upheaval of working, traveling, and managing my life in New York. It's still very difficult to talk about, but this record really is a breakup record while simultaneously nurturing and healing a new relationship. Also, I was leaving my life behind in New York um giving myself this period to reflect before I started my life in Berlin. It was this really transitional thing.

When I started writing lyrics, a lot of the tracks were very directly addressing feelings I was dealing with at the time with my breakup and going through a psychic realignment of leaving a place that had been my home for so long—and then also revisiting a place that was my home before that, as well as a place in Philly that was this weird vortex of all of these very important people and times in my life. It felt like while I was making this thing, I could just completely disappear.

When I was packing my life up, I ended up going back to my old apartment in Bed-Stuy and throwing the last edition of this party called False Peak. Literally as I was packing, I was playing some of the tracks that I'd been working on and writing the lyrics on my couch, getting ready to leave this place. "There Is a Place" is literally about the joy I was getting out of making and writing music—the joy and the pain—and letting it become this very nurturing thing that was bringing me closer to my friends. I was like, "I don't know who to reach out to right now. I feel alone. I feel confused. Do you want to throw down lyrics, or vocals, or some productions?" This joy, beauty, and protection from the world that I'd always found in making music became even more pronounced to me when I was trying to rebuild and regain my sense of self while living at my parents house and preparing to embark on a new part of my life.

The cover photo was taken by Dan Creahan—Alien D—who I met and was playing shows with in basements when I was 18. I was also making music with my friend Sean, who was in the band Perfect Pussy, and working with people like Opheliaxz and Kissen, who I started living with when I moved to Berlin, and working on the music video for "Bend" with my roommate Pontiac Streator. "Dreamseed" references a New York DJ whom I'd thrown a party with, and my current boyfriend and collaborator—and one of my earliest champions—doing vocals on "Dreamseed."

It was this healing place for me to put a lot of my confusion and pain somewhere that didn't damage other parts of my life. It felt like it was protecting me from hurting myself and other people, and turning the pain that I was feeling into something that felt uplifting. I think that's why the record translated into something that can touch different people that maybe aren't expecting to have a reaction to something that's made by an underground outsider ambient dub producer. If it's healing and meditative for me, then I hope that I can do something for other people in the same way.

I was actually going to ask about the album cover, because I clocked it as having been taken at Taqueria Acatlan on Irving and Myrtle.
[Laughs] Yeah, I mean this record is simultaneously a breakup record and an ode to new beginnings as well as this photobook of really beautiful and important things to me—the connective tissue between the people that I love. At that moment a couple of years ago, I ran into Dan on the street and we were about to go link up with our other friends and plan this party. We were like, "Let's get some food," and he snapped that photo. When I was putting the artwork together, I really wanted to stage a photo shoot and take photos. I had all these ideas—but that photo was the actual version of some of these ideas that I'd wanted to explore. It was something that was actually pulled from my real life.

The back cover is a photo of this '94 Volvo that I'd bought during lockdown and parked at Rockaway Beach on one of these little trips I'd take out a lot during COVID. The center labels are photos of the commercial route off of Beechwood, Pennsylvania. There's an importance of documenting the places and people along the way that I've been blessed enough to cross paths or share this life. Highlighting these things—the beauty of all the music that I've heard just walking down Myrtle Avenue, bumping out of people's Bluetooth systems or their trunks, music you hear when you're at the beach or driving down a commercial road—to me, capturing and communicating these things visually has always been a massive part of it.

Even in the process of making this record and working with 3XL on it, people were like, "Wow, you should really put this record out on like a bigger label and try to get more visibility." I was like, "That's not the point." The point, for me, is to work with the people that I love and love me back. I put this record out with somebody that has literally been supporting and championing me as an artist since when I was first starting to make mixes for internet radio.

The notion of constantly scaling up is a very 2010s mindset to me—and maybe how we got ourselves in some of the trouble that everyone faces now to begin with.
Oh, of course. We live in this world that's built off of these growth models, and we're also living in a time where we now see this really funny reflection of the larger music industry—a replication of a lot of things in music that feel antithetical to being in an underground music scene. This is a shared space, and we're all just flowers in the field.

Growth as a model doesn't really mean sustainability for anybody, and growth is not inherently inherently equitable or nurturing, individually or collectively. For me, growth means connecting, and making things stronger and better and more nurturing for everybody. This has always been why it's been always so important for me to obscure myself, in a lot of ways. With collaborative projects, it's gone to the point where my friends are like, "I don't even know who's in these bands or projects anymore"—and it's like, "Well, that's the whole point." Maybe it's self-sabotage, but it's what actually feels more sustainable.

I noticed you were wearing a Sublime shirt in a promo photo.
[Laughs] Yeah.

Do you have a relationship with Sublime's music?
Not terribly deeply. Honestly, that shirt I just saw on eBay and I was like, "Wow, this is really swag." But with my USB, I always joke around that I'll take requests, because chances are that I might actually fucking have exactly the song that you're wanting to hear. I have Sublime on my stick, and I have fucking Bush and Title Fight. I have Korn and Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park and Ashlee Simpson. People think about club music and club tools, and I'm like, "Well, all music is a tool." Any music is functional. It's music that paints the backgrounds and walls of our life.

It's about unabashedly loving this shit. I was literally just listening to Sublime and surfing eBay and being like, "Let me just see if there's any cool Sublime tees on here." And then Subhumans comes on and I'm like, "Cool, wait, I'm really into fucking punk again." I'm really into metal again, or college rock or whatever. Whether it's in like the way I dress or the way I approach an album or a project, it's about, what am I on right now? And what am I fucking listening to? What am I vibing to at any given moment, whether it's Aphex Twin or fucking Vladislav Delay or Sublime.

Yeah, I was talking to Daniel of Car Culture about this for the newsletter recently— the notion of how it's become a lost art to just play what people want to hear as a DJ and read the audience instead of being so practiced and professional about blends and beat-matching.
Quite frankly, the dancefloor doesn't always know what it wants or needs. Sometimes that means reading the room. To me, I'm trying to connect with you and feel the vibe of the dancefloor—but sometimes it's about guiding that journey for people.

DJ'ing is so directly tied with my music-making process. Music is just fucking sick. I love it, and I listen to so much of it, and there's so much of it that I'm like, "Maybe like people don't know they need to hear this right now." They're coming down or having a weird trip, and they don't know they want to hear fucking Justin Bieber or Billie Eilish—some shit that's actually going to give them the most comfort. Sometimes people don't know they need to cry on the dancefloor.

I feel like I was getting corralled into being a DJ by people around me, and the way that people started writing about my practices. But there's also being out in the world and experiencing these things and being like, "What do I want to play on the dancefloor?" Sometimes I want to play Waka Flocka Flame, and people don't know they need to fucking shake ass right now and just be stupid and let the fuck go. Some people think they need to fucking transcend to psychedelic techno all the time. It's all just part of the bigger ecosystem of music. It doesn't need to be just one thing.