MARTINE SYMS AND BEN BABBITT ON CELLISTS AND HYPNOTISTS

MARTINE SYMS: Ben, I met you in the summer of 2021, but already knew your name. A Ben Babbitt figure had been in several of my dreams before I met you. So, it was a matter of time, right?

BEN BABBITT: We met and then you texted me a dream that you had.

SYMS: Yeah, that’s how I got your phone number.

BABBITT: From your dream? That’s prophetic.

SYMS: That’s how my dreams work. I’m pretty tapped, you know. During the time we were working on The African Desperate, we were also just playing music together, which was really fun.

BABBITT: It all felt very natural and not forced. When you, Colin [Self], and I worked on the score, we formed a little band, and it was really joyful. You’re one of the easiest people to work with. It was the perfect mixture of support, acceptance, encouragement, and challenge. You obviously have your vision. It’s very dialed and confident, but you’re also very open and not too controlfreaky nitpicky.

SYMS: Scoring is just fun; it’s really fluid. I was in hypnosis earlier, and one thing we were talking about was my energy. I like to play, have fun with what I’m doing, and feel open to discovery. The hypnotist reminded me that I often bring that sense of play to situations, which I forget sometimes.

BABBITT: That dynamic is hard to describe, but it feels like there’s a mutual reaching for something. It’s like feeling around in the dark.

SYMS: Definitely. It’s always funny to me when someone’s not into music. I don’t understand that—it’s so fundamental to my existence.

BABBITT: I can’t talk to a person who isn’t into music. I can’t be in the same room with a person like that.

SYMS: You’ve been performing a lot lately—how is that experience different from recording?

BABBITT: Performing is like a hybrid of fixed, pre-composed stuff that I’ve spent tons of time on. But even if you’re playing something that’s fully baked, stuff still goes wrong onstage in front of an audience. Even just the way it feels, the vulnerability of being seen, I’m not really one of those people who feeds off that attention.

When I’m performing, I wanna feel some kind of visceral catharsis, right? But at the same time, I have a laptop onstage with me, which can make me feel trapped—it’s a delicate environment where, if you flick the mouse wrong, you can fuck everything up.

SYMS: For me, that’s where improvisation helps. I wanted to start doing shows where I share my computer screen but nothing is scripted, like, Okay, I’m just going to tell a story using this digital portal of images and sounds without trying to make it perfect or using Keynote or anything. What was exciting to me about it was the improvisation—once I felt like I was doing the same things, it became much less interesting to me.

I took voice lessons from [Odeya Nini] for years, and before that I took yoga classes at her house three times a week. She would always talk about the voice, how you’re touching people with it, how you can envelop people with it. It’s like this weird fingerprint, because only you have your voice. I go in and out of wanting to use my voice in my work, but I think you can bring a lot of disparate elements together through your voice.

BABBITT: You made an A.I. model of your voice for one of your recent shows