<\/p>\n

Artist residencies have been around for decades. A musician or painter or filmmaker will set up shop in a new place for a limited period of time. Most of those places, understandably, tend to be on land. <\/p>\n

The Vermont pianist and composer Ben Cosgrove has never taken obvious paths though, and last fall he did his work sailing from Vietnam to Australia on the massive research vessel Falkor<\/a>. While onboard, he wrote and recorded songs inspired by his aquatic surroundings, some of which appear on his new record Salt<\/em>. “It was my first time at sea, and I was deeply fascinated by the way one has to orient oneself in a place like that,” he says now. “I\u2019d never been anywhere that simultaneously felt so still and so in motion.”<\/p>\n

Cosgrove has long written compositions inspired by place; his tunes have titles like “Montreal Song” or “Narrow Land\/River of Grass.” Translating a place into sound isn’t a linear process though – a loud setting doesn’t necessarily become a loud song, he says. “Whenever I\u2019m struck by some feature of the world, it\u2019s just a matter of identifying exactly what the thing was about that landscape or place that impressed or astonished me so much and then determining what musical stuff from the arsenal I\u2019ve amassed that I should deploy in order to best reflect, imitate, or express that.”<\/p>\n

Salt<\/em> continues in this vein, though here the songs are more about types<\/em> of landscapes than specific locations he’s visited. And many tracks reflect his recent ocean voyage, at least indirectly. “All the songs on this record are about different places where the relationship between water and land \u2013 or, more accurately, ground and not-ground \u2013 can sometimes be ambiguous or even impossible to know,” he says. “I went through a bad break-up a little while back\u2026 Writing this whole album about landscapes in flux \u2013 estuaries, salt marshes, fault lines, frozen lakes, and so on \u2013 turned out to be the perfect way for me to work through that.”<\/p>\n