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Benjamin Finger, "The Bet"
It has been five years since Benjamin Finger released his masterpiece, 2009's Woods of Broccoli, which makes it as good a time as any for him to release a thematically similar successor.  Though not quite a full reprise of Woods' lushly hallucinatory aesthetic, The Bet's warped piano-and-sound-collage miniatures make for yet another warmly beautiful trip down the rabbit hole.  Nobody does fractured dreaminess better than Benjamin Finger.
Now that I have heard The Bet and have the benefit of hindsight, last year's comparatively simple and Satie-esque Listen To My Nerves Hum makes a lot more sense to me.  I now realize that it was not a departure or divergence from the abstract psychedelia of Finger's earlier solo work, but merely a rather unexpected bridge to the next frontier in abstract psychedelia (this one).  More succinctly: The Bet reprises Finger’s recent fascination with fragile, melancholy piano motifs, albeit in altered form.  Initially, the change is not especially profound, as the opening "Faintheadedness" merely adds some watery reverb to Benjamin's quiet plinking, but The Bet is an album of escalating weirdness and it does not take long before anything recognizably Satie-esque starts to drift in and out of focus, sound stretched, or sound like time has stopped cooperating entirely and caused a single snippet to keep piling up on itself.
Of course, the pianos are not the weirdest part of The Bet by a long shot, though I do not think the album becomes fully unstuck from reality until the fifth song, "Bad-Luck Planet."  I use "song" in the loosest way possible here: things like hooks and structure are but distant specks in Finger's rearview mirror these days.  I actually mean that as a compliment, as The Bet's warmly hallucinatory dream-soup is simply not a place where fully formed, graspable things can or should exist. What exists instead are mere snatches of hooks and beats amidst an increasingly fluttering, burbling maelstrom of skipping loops, distant voices, beds of lovely wordless female singing, snippets of radio, and fragments of tinkling piano.  Despite that, a few songs still manage to stand out a bit, primarily those parts with some hint of menace, like the eerily plunging strings(?) near the end of the aforementioned "Bad Luck Planet."
I am also especially fond of the dissonantly droning strings and industrial pulsing in "Care in Motion," but The Bet is truly an album that is meant to be experienced as a whole.  The gradual journey into Finger's shifting alternate dimension of gibbering, surreal lunacy mingled with delicate beauty is the real attraction here–not any of the specific stops along the way.  That said, all of the individual pieces are almost invariably quite good (though the ephemerally brief "Faintheadedness" does not linger long enough to make much of an impression).  And even when they seem weak, the offending part generally transitions into something better so quickly that it is immediately forgotten.  Does that make The Bet yet another masterpiece?  I am not sure.  I think I still prefer Woods of Broccoli (I like songs sometimes), but The Bet may very well be a cut above in regards to artistry, sophistication, and vision.  Regardless, it certainly is a wonderful and unique album, as well as a very promising contender for "best headphone album of 2014."
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