Alicia Hansen and Ben Brown: Companion album launch concert, Thursday, Sept. 24 at Pyatt Hall, VSO School of Music, 8 p.m. Tickets: $8/$10. aliciahansenbenbrown. brownpapertickets.com
On their new collaborative album, Vancouver musicians Alicia Hansen and Ben Brown challenged themselves to take a new approach to their craft.
"I'm happy with how we opened up the songwriting forum so the music features a lot of improvisation and more experimental song structures," says one half of the duo, Hansen, a Bowen Island resident.
The resulting work, Companion, featuring Hansen on vocals and piano, with Brown on drums, was released Aug. 25. In celebration, the long-time collaborators are set to take the stage at an album launch event Thursday, Sept. 24 at Pyatt Hall at the VSO School of Music.
Hansen and Brown met while both were studying at Vancouver Community College. They played in different ensembles together and eventually started collaborating on her songs, working together as a duo.
"We just discovered that we had a really great musical chemistry and became friends really easily and we've sort of gone from there," says Hansen.
While Companion is their first official duo release, they have one recording already under their belts, 2008's Freighters, which Hansen describes as more of a demo of sorts, recorded in just over a day.
"We just went in there and practically recorded (the songs) live off the floor," she says.
Some of the material later went on to find its way onto Hansen's solo debut, 2011's Fractography, made while she and Brown were on hiatus.
Having resumed working together, the artists began crafting the new crop of songs, typically working from original material created by Hansen and then pivotally shaped by Brown.
"Sometimes for me the songs are in a really raw, unfinished form. So then we get together and we play and through the process of playing and improvising the songs take form and develop. It's my original material, but Ben helps me to develop it and take it in directions that I might not otherwise. And of course his drum lines are really a key part of the compositions," says Hansen.
Having created enough material, they decided it was time to enter the studio once more.
"The idea was to make a duo-based record so that it was really featuring the drums and piano and the interplay between those two instruments but then also using a few other instruments to highlight certain aspects of the music and to bring out certain melodies and harmonies," says Hansen.
Three other players joined them, enriching and embellishing the music, including producer Dave Sikula (The Inhabitants) on guitar, Russell Sholberg (Airplane Trio) on bass, and Peggy Lee on cello.
Tracks include "Outside my Window," which lyrically reflects Hansen's home on Bowen and the atmosphere of living in such a beautiful place, as well as "Rods and Cones," an instrumental exploring the shifting and perplexing relationship between piano and drums, and the duo members' forays into improvisations and back and forth interplay.
Hansen has long used music as an outlet of expression, exploring her personal life and experience.
The new album is exemplary of that, its title referencing her current phase in life, feeling strongly supported by a number of key "companions" -her 20-month-old son, her husband and of course her musical partner, Brown, included. "Whereas before (I) was writing music from a much more lonely and solitary place," she says of her journey to date.
While that journey, both personal as well as artistic, is often expressed through her songwriting, she does take some creative liberties.
"My music is also a really carefully crafted fiction in some ways. It is definitely expressing parts of me but sometimes in a way that's almost in code, it's in metaphor and it's using lyrics to evoke a feeling rather than to tell the story of something that's literally happened. The stories all sound really, really personal but sometimes it's more of a metaphor than anything else," she says.
Apart from their work with the duo, Hansen works at Early Music Vancouver as a production manager, and Brown is a member of the Juno Award-winning Pugs Crows.
As well, he's the founder of Vancouver's Music and Movement Mondays Improv Collective,
where his main focus is multidisciplinary creative collaboration. Brown works mostly with dancers as solo drum and dance is a passion.
He recently returned from a six-month solo tour of Europe where he collaborated with musicians and dancers in addition to working with Dame Evelyn Glennie.
