Ben Vida’s Oblivion Seekers Turns Away From Digital Abstraction

Ben Vida spent years pushing into dense, digital abstraction. Albums like Damaged Particulates and his collaborations with Marina Rosenfeld dissolved sound into synthetic particles, inhuman and deliberately disorienting. His new full-length, Oblivion Seekers, does something quietly radical in its own right: it sets all that circuitry aside.

Out now on Shelter Press, the album centers on four extended tracks built from duologues, untreated voices trading fractured poetic lines against beds of analogue hiss and slow-moving tone. The cover itself is a concrete poem that reads, in part, “Muttering ambient language / cutting into the past / with the future spilling out around us.” It works as a mission statement. The record doesn’t just use the voice, it treats it as raw material, exposed and entirely unprocessed, something close to a field recording of thought.

Vida’s shift isn’t a retreat. The album’s long, slackened forms demand the same focused listening that his more abrasive music did, but the texture is different now. Spoken fragments overlap, pause, repeat. The words feel like overheard conversations, half-remembered and rearranged into an abstract narrative about living inside language. There’s no digital glaze to hide behind, just the grain of a voice in a room, which turns out to be far stranger than any software.

This is the first full album under Vida’s name since 2019, and it arrives as a deliberate clearing of the air. By choosing the vulnerability of unadorned speech and analogue warmth, he’s made something that asks listeners to sit with it differently. No distractions, no spectacle. Just a quiet insistence that the human voice still has a lot to say.