Quirky, acoustical music -- alternately snide, maudlin, playful, lugubrious, with a touch of easy listening.

9 MP3 Songs
FOLK: Folk Pop, FOLK: Modern Folk



Details:
Ben Gun is Mark David Walp, a painter, rare book dealer and junk shop owner who has also performed as Ruprecht Lilliford, Chief Busker to the Exiled Queen of Wantonhussey. He lives and plays music with his friends on a six-acre farm in northern New York. He was born in eastern Pennsylvania with Mennonite forbears and is the pathetic product of a private school (Ben apologizes for this plagiarism) -- educated to the point of alienation but saved by healthy hard living and a redneck bar band. He is just a man, and getting older every day, but music and Art with a small A have always been his passions. He has not written or sent out a resume in fifteen years and has never sought psychiatric help.

This CD of nine original songs was painstakingly home recorded in the spring, autumn, winter and spring of 2005-06. Ben sings and plays acoustic and electric guitars, flutes and saxophone. Friends round out certain tracks with voice, violin, and bass. The songs are mostly haunting narrative numbers or catchy, ribald fantasies. One of Ben's pals described them as "Achingly lovelorn, with an overlay of 'fuck you!'" They often sting and caress at the same time.

Ben plays out occasionally, although his music and painting have been relatively private. He is grateful for an Information Age that allows independent artists to maintain irreverent (or is it irrelevant?) anonymity and so lead lives of quiet desecration. With that in mind, he invites listeners to embellish this short account of his life and music and to promote any sort of fiction that will add to his fame and comfort.