BEN RICHTER: Mymerian

SEDCD074 | Released in 2026 | 200 copies | $15

This music was made possible through the kind invitation of Executive Director Jamie Mohr to a winter residency at Epsilon Spires, a non-profit performance center housed in a historic former church in Brattleboro, Vermont, with the opportunity to compose a set of works for their 1906 three-manual Estey pipe organ. Due to the frigid temperatures, the organ was sounding almost 60 cents flat from A=440Hz. In combination with Laura Cetilia and Mike Bullock’s intonationally flexible A=440 low string instruments and Ben's A=444 quarter-tone accordion, this created a unique pitch landscape and dark atmosphere from which emerged three meditations on the ripples, pulsations, and slow transformations of memory.

 

Mymerian (Green) — 29:45

–20, –33, –59

Personal — metamorphic memory. yester, peaks island, bear lake, harghita

"can you imagine the echoes of all the footsteps you have ever taken?" 

"fading physical being toward that special mysterious silence" (PO)

Three Fields (Blue) — 20:11

–6,100, –53,000

Ancestral — sedimental memory. yore, cucuteni, shanidar, riverine

"making space for the yet unborn through stillness ... disappearance, void ...

vast heart opens. this is where love is. all time is present" (PO)

Vaalbara (Red) — 11:21

–3,000,000,000

Geologic — igneous memory. primordia, archaea, volcanean

"the earth is also sound ... rocks are her ears recording all of her events from the beginning" (PO)

compositions by Ben Richter

recorded live in concert at Epsilon Spires, March 22, 2025

performed by:

Ben Richter, organ and quarter-tone accordion

Laura Cetilia, cello

Mike Bullock, contrabass

produced by Rob Forman

engineered and mixed by Ben Richter

mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi

design by Mike Bullock

special thanks to Jamie Mohr and Rob Forman

blue text by Pauline Oliveros from The Earthworm Also Sings and Imaginary Meditations

Ben Richter is a composer, accordionist, and founding director of Ghost Ensemble. Inspired by nonhuman consciousness, Ben’s music orients toward interacting gradual processes that cross acoustic thresholds to auralize the vast and infinitesimal timescales of geologic and ecological systems. As an accordionist, Ben explores intonation and airflow preparations that extend the instrument’s microtonal and timbral capacities, with collaborating composers and in original works such as Aurogeny (2023) and Panthalassa: Dream Music of the Once and Future Ocean (2017). In addition to Ghost Ensemble works Rewild (2022) and Wind People (2016), Ben’s recent commissions include experimental chamber works for Diapason Brass, Loadbang, House On Fire, Jack Dettling, Jeonghyeon Joo, and Margaret Lancaster, as well as music/sound in intermedia collaborations with Lei Han, Goldie Poblador, M Dougherty, and UMass-Amherst’s Futuring Lab and Y3K exhibitions. Ben’s music has been released on Blue Tapes, greyfade, Indexical, Infrequent Seams, New World Records, Sawyer Editions, and Sedimental.