Ball of Wax 51 is going to be quite a long ride, so I thought it would be nice to get off to a mellow start. If you’ve been to a Ball of Wax show in the past few years you’ve probably seen Paul Beaudry in one group or another. He is or has been a Foghorn, a Virgin of the Bird, a Caleb or a Walter (I guess he’s Walter? Not sure how that works), a member of Double or Muffin (more on them later), and probably a million other things. He’s a ludicrously talented and omnipresent multi-instrumentalist and singer, and somehow it never occurred to me that he probably squirrels himself away in his down time (ha ha!) and creates beautiful electronic music by sampling things he finds in his garage. And yet here we are, with “Belzinbox,” from his solo project autOaudiO (which, if you check out that Bandcamp page, you will discover has been active forever and produced an enormous pile of albums).
You probably wouldn’t know from listening to it that “Belzinbox” was created from the sounds of tools and other found objects, but it is a really lovely assemblage of electronic pings and booms and drones that, if you’re me anyway, totally puts you in the mood to sit down and listen to 7 more hours of long-form music. My computer tells me it’s over 14 minutes long, but every time I sit down to listen to it, it’s over too fast. Before I would just skip back to the beginning, but now I seem to have some Bandcamp digging to do . . .