Career
The Portobello Film Festival described him as "brought up in Ladbroke Grove, West London and. on a weird and wonderful musical journey ever since, through folk tinged broken beat, Experimental Hip hop, electronica and anywhere in-between". Aside from vocal, and lyrical duties, Ben River"s musical contributions to projects he has been involved with has included Guitar, both acoustic and electric. Also Bass guitar and Piano/Synths.
He also incorporates many electronic elements to his work. programming beats and manipulating samples. is an experimental music collective founded in 2009.
The first meeting took place during the time of an event "Terra Firma" where Lee Harris and Ben River had both performed separately. A few years later Hicham invited Lee to record something for a project he was working on and quite organically the album (Album) was born.
They brought in special Guests such as writer Brian Barritt, rapper JC001 and Hicham wrote the music, performed vocally on four of the album"s songs and remixed the song “Three men in a boat with Howard Marks originally released on the previous album “30 Years of Counter Culture” The album was released in 2009 on Genepool/Universal Music Group. The album has been described by Upsetter Magazine as “the 21st century equivalent of the early experiments with beat poetry and improvised Jazz” and the K&C Daily Times said "a heady mix of both spoken word poetry and fractured samples.
The album is recontextualising the beat poets into the modern age".