Amek nl_39: Ben Wheeler live in Bulgaria

Concerts, interview, new zines in the distro

We start the year with a few events and a few reminders. If you are not here for Amek news but for the English version of our Ben Wheeler interview, originally published in Bulgarian here, find it at the bottom of the newsletter.

Cyberian - Tristaris

We released this record in the final moments of 2025 so it’s a great moment to remind you about it. Almost four years in the making, Tristaris is the third full-length album by Stefan Bachvarov as Cyberian. On the surface, the album feels more straightforward, but the closer you experience it, the further you reach within its intricately intertwining layers of hard-hitting percussion, melancholy-drenched melodies, hypnotising ambiance, and meticulously orchestrated sonic details that swirl around you, making the producer’s vision even more vivid.

Get Tristaris on tape (ltd. to 70) and digital here.

Reminder

Last time, we told you about Birds Drink My Blood, Born Erased’s debut for Cyclic Law. The album is finally out and copies of the CD are available in Bulgaria here.

Distro

We have the Fall 2025 issue of Canada’s Untitled Zine as well as a ton of copies from previous issues as well as the latest Noise Receptor, Women in Noise & Personal Best issues. Hit us up at amekcollective (at) gmail to get some proper reads on noise, experimental music and obscure art.

Concerts

The big news this month is Ben Wheeler (BNELETI) is coming to Bulgaria for three concerts, in Sofia, Ruse, and Varna. We are lending a hand for two of them.

On February 22, he will share the stage at Pave with His Last Winter, a new guitar-based drone project by Asen Santev of Brodnik, Upyr and Trysth fame. The show is part of our ШУМНА НЕДЕЛЯ series. Get your ticket here and see you at Pave!

On February 26, Ben is playing with Lower Sound Dimension, a solo project by Peter Vassilev of Origami Lake, at ToN 618, Varna. RSVP here.

Interview

Ben Wheeler is a US-born guitarist, composer, and ethnomusicologist currently residing in Tbilisi, Georgia. In February, he will perform three concerts in Bulgaria as part of his Central and Eastern European tour. However, this will not be his first visit to our country. The occasion is the debut album of his project Bneleti, which in archaic Georgian means “land of darkness”. As you may have guessed, part of his interests are focused on music and sounds that have a long history, ones that are sometimes on the verge of extinction.

Wheeler’s sound is built on electric guitar, saz, and modular synthesizer. He intertwines dark ambient, drone, experimental composition, the extreme music of the Seattle hardcore and black metal scenes with inspirations from Azerbaijani guitar music and Georgian polyphony.

Hello, Ben, you’re a man of many interests and projects, but let’s start with your involvement in ethnomusicology, in a world that’s constantly striving to discover ‘the next new thing’, what drove you to this discipline that’s more interested in unearthing what soon might disappear or might appear as forgotten?

It’s fitting because my introduction to Bulgarian music was the gateway to my interest in Musicology.

I was playing in bands back in the Pacific Northwest area of the US while growing up there, and we played a genre called “Math Rock” music, which incorporated a lot of odd time signatures and compound meter. When I started to study music at University of Oregon, I was lucky enough to meet both Kalin Kirilov, a truly incredible musician and music theorist who was working as a graduate teaching fellow, and Carol Silverman, a cultural anthropologist and folklorist. They introduced me to Bulgarian wedding music; when I first heard Ivo Papazov, it was a real revelation for me; the virtuosity and fluidity, the creativity and approach to timing and transitions. It resonated with some elements of what I had been playing in these bands, but was of course on another level entirely. This inspired me to dig deeper into music outside of my own environment, to visit Bulgaria when I was just 19 years old and meet with musicians via Kalin, and to reconsider my entire approach to music.

But the initial motivation was to just learn more aspects of this music to apply and incorporate into my own; I didn’t understand the cultural, historical, regional, and all the other complex dimensions of this music. It wasn’t until I actually travelled to the country that I began to understand that my approach was a bit misguided, that I actually needed to consider not just the music but all that comes along with it. And here I think is where the real motivation to pursue Musicology began.

I do care very much about this notion of preservation and the real danger of traditions becoming lost or forgotten, but I think it’s important to frame them differently. In fact, I think the more we consider “folk” traditions as something purely grounded in the past, the more we are prone to forget them. In a way, I think many of these traditions, as they evolve and adapt to their changing surroundings, are actually “the next new thing,” (or maybe the next “new/old thing”) and can be better preserved when they are considered as such.

For the past 6 years, you’ve been exploring the musical traditions of the Caucasus region. What exactly brought you there, of all places? What did you discover that made you stay and continue this long-standing research?

Music was the primary reason for first coming to the Caucasus back in 2012. I wanted to learn more about music from the region and meet musicians. I just had no idea that the Caucasus was home to such diverse musical practices and environments, not just in terms of “folk” music, but when it came to electronic experimental music in Tbilisi and Yerevan. In the same weekend, I can hear Azerbaijani wedding musicians an hour south of Tbilisi, techno at a club in the capital, and polyphonic singing in a village an hour east.

So I’ve stayed because I wanted to be a part of this sonic environment, researching, teaching, composing, and performing.

Not only is the Caucasus region inspiring in terms of the art that has been created there, but it’s an amazing place geographically as well. As a person who’s spent a lot of time there, do you see this amazing nature reflected in the music? Is this among the reasons why it’s been so captivating for you?

There’s certainly a correlation between the musical, linguistic, and cultural, and the natural, topographic, and bio diversity of the region. I have travelled all over the South Caucasus and one of the most amazing things is the micro-climates you can experience just moving an hour or two in any direction: tropics, deserts, mountains, lakes. I would say I’ve dedicated the most time to a particular corner of Georgia called Tusheti. It’s possibly the most remote area in the entire region, or at least the least accessible, with the road closed for more than half the year. This is a truly special place and the annual composer’s workshop (Caucasus All Frequency) that I run with the Georgian composer Giorgi Koberidze is part of a residency there called AqTushetii. The natural environment of this region has made a pretty profound effect for sure.

Bulgaria will experience your own music in three evenings, in three different cities, something few touring musicians do. I hope you’ll find this inspiring, but tell us more about your project BNELETI, what led to this music, and how your experiences in the Caucasus region impacted your overall approach to writing and performing?

Bneleti is an amalgamation of these different influences that kept coming up in my song writing processes, structural elements of music from the Caucasus (not so much in the form of melodic elements but in harmonic structures, ornaments, tones, and techniques), the harsher/darker side of music I was exposed to growing up in the Pacific Northwest, and also some of the philosophy of modular synthesis, all paired with my own compositional practices. Basically Bneleti stitches together a wide variety of musics, but what I hope will be heard is something that feels sonical whole and also novel.

What’s the biggest challenge in making music that’s somewhat of a meeting point between such different realities, approaches, and histories? How do you balance all those elements?

It’s an ongoing process of assessment: creative, aesthetic, and even ethical. I have to consider the nature of the influences I am drawing from, to ensure that an appreciative homage does not spill over into extractive or appropriative practices. I’ve developed some guidelines and practices for this that I actually outline during my Caucasus All Frequency workshop but it’s always evolving, as I think it should!

You mentioned this is not your first visit to our country. Could you tell me about the first time you came here?

My first trip to Bulgaria was in 2006; I travelled around the country meeting and recording musicians, in a very informal and unorganized way. I did a route through the middle of the country, travelling from Sofia to Plovdiv to Varna to Sliven and back. These were spots recommended to me by various musicians and friends. In Plovdiv, I bought a local Orpheus guitar from the 70s, disconnected the neck, and carried the thing with me across the whole country. This was the very first addition to my growing collection of guitars manufactured in the Eastern Bloc; I now have around 15 or so and am planning a project dedicated to their history. I am totally obsessed with them and it’s thanks to this little shop in Plovdiv. And that’s just one example of so many of the ways that Bulgaria made an impression on me musically. It was a really consequential trip for me.

You’re from the US, and yet you decided to work with a Turkish label to release this music, even though I believe quite a few US imprints would’ve welcomed your music being rooted in more extreme genres but fused with something more unique. Why did you feel it was important to keep it in the East?

The simplest answer is that Inverted Spectrum Records is a great label/booking agency and I really like the platform that the founder Işık Sarıhan has created. I also do like the idea of keeping things “local” or “regional,” at least. When it comes to the US, I have not been there for over 10 years and also became a dual citizen of Georgian a few years ago; in so many ways I am more invested in living, working, and making music in this part of the world. Işık is doing a lot to expand and codify touring networks in a region I feel often gets overshadowed by more Western/Northern European countries and I’m very happy to be a part of that process.

Could you tell us about your project, Mountains of Tongues? Is it a label, is it at an archival project, or maybe it’s something of both and something more?

I co-founded Mountains of Tongues with my close friend and colleague Stefan Williamson Fa back in 2012. We wanted to dedicate a project to recording music that was being potentially overlooked; the traditions of ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities in the Caucasus, but we also wanted to simply reframe coverage of traditions in the region by approaching them through a more regional, less national lens. It has since expanded from an ethnography project; we have released multiple albums of our own field recordings, but also worked with archival recordings, made a documentary film about the culture of electric guitar music in Azerbaijan, provided tour support for local musicians, and founded different educational initiatives.

As shown in Sasha Voronov’s brilliant Bonfires and Stars documentary, some people are very protective, and sometimes rightly so, of their folklore, especially when it’s being presented in a new, more modern context. Have you met people who refused to have their performances and stories documented?

Bulat and Timur, who I would argue are really the stars of that film, are our DIY ethnography brothers with Mountains of Tongues. We’ve multiple records together; one I am particularly proud of: the music of Pontic Greeks from Abkhazia.

But to answer your question, there have been very few instances and I believe the cause had more to do with us being strangers (a very legitimate reason to be cautious) than a feeling that the musician had to “safe guard” or “protect” the music from us. A more common issue is the misconception of what it means to be a musician. In many parts of the Caucasus, when we were to ask “are there any musicians living here?”, the answer was often no. This is because this phrasing implies we are looking for a person that makes music as their primary source of income, as their title or profession. We learned to adjust this question to include people how simply like to sing songs or “fiddle” with instruments, and then ended up being exposed to some of the most amazing music I’ve heard in my life.

Is documentation enough for music to survive the test of time? What other steps should and can be undertaken for people to rediscover the roots of their culture?

No, documentation is not enough. With Mountains of Tongues, we were first primarily interested in making recordings but over time realized that while we were capturing an important moment in time, the result served as a record and resource only. Maybe it will be of use to future generations in that regard, but it does less in terms of supporting traditions, and most critically the people who keep them alive, in the present. We’ve shifted towards more collaborative work, knowledge exchange between experimental and folk musicians where they can share both insights on their respective musics, but also important logistical advice and considerations. I think encouraging new platforms and modes of engagement with these musics, varying forms of pedagogy, and even curating their presentation differently (avoiding staging this music purely as exhibitions of “heritage”), are all ways of at least supporting.

I guess your work in Georgia is far from finished but is there a place in the world you’d already like to explore in the future, or maybe this tour is a way to find one?

This tour is my chance to introduce this music to a different audience that may find some things both familiar and new. It’s a good chance to perform in a different context, but also to help build better connections between the Caucasus and Central/Eastern Europe. I also am honestly just excited to return to Bulgaria after all these years because, as I mentioned, it was a really formative experience for me. Twenty years ago I could not have imagined I would be returning to perform my own music in three cities across the country – it’s a great honor for me!