Hello Whirled presents NO VICTORIES
Content Warning: profanity, noise, politics, religion, death, suicide, murder, mental health
To the left is a picture of me, or above if you’re on your phone.
Benjamin Spizuco
Benjamin Spizuco is a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer with an Interactive Multimedia degree from the College of New Jersey and a minor in Music Technology. His band, Hello Whirled, has been consistently releasing albums since 2016. He has also worked in the live sound booth at the Mildred & Ernest E. Mayo Concert Hall. He started and ran an event at the College of New Jersey called IMMovation, where Interactive Multimedia majors were paired up based on common interests and skills and had several weeks to produce something. This event yielded short films, songs, video games, and even a professor-hosted podcast.
Note: for Bandcamp purposes, the “preview” track is set to track 9. For proper album listening, don’t use this window because you’ll start at the end of Side A.
This is the whole album with gapless playback. If you’re not interested in downloading the album from Bandcamp, this is the best way to listen to the album the way it was intended.
We Don’t Talk About The Fall…
First, this title means three things:
There’s a band called The Fall. They have a big cult following. I think they suck.
There’s a Gorillaz album called The Fall. People don’t talk about it. I wish they did more.
My thesis in the fall was completely different from this. It was more focused on collaborating with others. It was an abject failure. I tried that idea because it wasn’t “just another Hello Whirled album”.
So naturally, my great big senior thesis is a Hello Whirled album. It’s called No Victories. It is my 60th album across all of my various projects, and the 100th release to bear the Hello Whirled name.
The writing process was more deliberate than anything I’d ever done. I recorded eight 10-minute EPs each driven by a concept, which dictated the direction of the songs. After 35 songs were done, I picked the best 15 to develop further. 2 songs were promptly cut, with 4 new songs recorded in their place.
Perhaps I should talk about the recording process too.
I recorded most of the album in my bedroom at home, with a DAW called Reaper. It’s not the most high-quality setup in the world, but I think music sounds better when it’s a little rough around the edges. Also I can’t afford studio time, but I got some anyway because I interned at Gradwell House Recording throughout the spring semester. If no one else was doing anything, I was allowed to use the studio to work on my own projects. Because I had already recorded so much at home, and I had to engineer the music myself, I mostly used this studio time to record drums.
No Victories is available on Bandcamp, Spotify, and a bunch of other places. If you look to your left, you will see embeds for Bandcamp (for downloading and buying) and Spotify (for streaming).
Naturally, I didn’t think to film much of the recording process
except for the drum recording on “I’ll Hold The Mirror”, which you can watch right here.