Ben Varian & Sarah Safaie - Ark's Joy (Self Release)

The Slow Music Movement
3 days ago
2 min read

This is the cover for Ben Varian & Sarah Safaie's, Ark's Joy. It's an air brushed image depicting a wooden ark floating on clouds with a rainbow trail under a starry sky, it's pretty cheesy stuff. The text reads "Sarah Safaie & Ben Varian Ark's Joy" in the top left.

Ben Varian and Sarah Safaie are LA based multi-instrumentalists. Safiae is something of a lady about LA music town after relocating from the East Coast ten years ago, collaborating on all sorts of cool projects. A wind specialist who plays tenor, baritone and alto saxophone, she still has some breath left for vocal duty and spare energy to keep things bumping on the bass. Not to be outdone Varian provides the percussive drive, can also chip in on bass and keys whilst dropping some guitar when he gets his hands free.

There seems to be no shortage of creative juices flowing between the pair either, as hot on the heels of their debut album last year they've just released the follow up that you see before you.

It's a polaroid camera image of Sarah Safaie and Ben Varian on a sunny day, in sunglasses standing side by side in front of a red wall. She wears a red polka dot dress, and he has a blue shirt.

The album starts easily enough on a spiritual Sunday morning vibe, the pair easing into the session with some simple but uplifting piano and sax refrains, politely ushered through the speakers by some languid drums. Hold tight for the suitably entitled, "oregano wormhole" which takes an immediate left turn and doesn't let up. What sounds like some form of guitar abuse kicks things off, which is then tightly looped, brain cell scrambling and unrelenting, tempered by a warm bumping bassline and comforting sax lines that bely the psychedelic edginess as Sofaie stretches out on her instrument of choice, but just when you think you've got the track's measure it suddenly launches into a full on samba jazz dancer. Let's go.

Whimsically they follow that up with the sweet, samba soul of "joonam", the pair harmonising over some smooth sax and keys, bolstered by some low key funkiness to keep your head nodding as you wait for you caipirinha to arrive. It's time to hit the floor next with the psychedelic Afro-grooviness of "bulls in ascension" that bumps, swirls, grooves and trips in equals measure. Far-out funkiness and some cosmic bump is the order of the day with "scampi strut" with Varian setting the keyboard controls for the heart of the sun over its tight groove and Sofaie's surreal spoken words, then before you can draw breath it's swiftly back to Africa with "yadda +", the pair channeling the spirit of 70's Lagos for today's LA dancers.

It's a sentimental trip down down private eye memory lane with "song for peter falk" next, before soaring out on a thermal with a dreamy, electroid machine grooving, ultimately distorting cover version of Steve Miller's evergreen "Fly Like an Eagle", which closes out this "saxophone centric groove based eccentric mixtape" a treat.

It's a summer primed, idiosyncratic collection of tunes that should help variously get the party started, help prise open some doors of perception and soundtrack your stoned evenings on the beach watching the sun go down, or all three if you're lucky.