Fundamental Air by Dave Benham

Live flute & synth performance in the time of COVID

I first discovered the Native American flute in December 2009 in Santa Fe, NM while celebrating my 20th wedding anniversary with my wife Linda. By 2012 back in Baltimore, MD, I was regularly attending the Teavolve open mic run by Rob Hinkal from the band ilyAIMY. Live performance became a critical part of my life. Many talented musicians rotated through those open mics, and my favorite pastime was jamming with as many as I could, coming up with unrehearsed flute improvisations on the spot.

Then COVID hit, and everything changed. By March 30, 2020 Maryland was in complete lock-down, making it impossible to play to an audience, or play with others. In response, Rob began hosting a weekly Virtual Open Mic (VOM) on Zoom, and it quickly became a vital lifeline for a large group of musicians and audience members from all over the United States, Canada, and beyond! It played a major role in maintaining my sanity throughout the isolation of the next couple years.

Internet latency in Zoom sessions made performing with others impossible. So I learned to use VCV Rack to create self playing synth patches and use them as inspiration for improvisation on my flutes. VCV Rack became my playing partner.

Every Monday night VOM was recorded and is still available today with limited ZOOM sound quality on Rob's Open Mics YouTube channel. Eventually I learned to record higher quality audio in my DAW as I was broadcasting over ZOOM. These higher quality home audio recordings became the source material for this album – a sort of musical journal of the difficult times we all faced.

I had already created many of my own YouTube videos - marrying my audio with the video from the Zoom recordings. But I had no idea how to mix the audio properly. My buddy Dan La Porta from La Porta Sound has done an amazing job remixing and mastering the audio for this album.

So a big thanks to Rob and his VOM co-host Rowan Corbett, Dan, Linda, and all the VOM folk – without them, this album would never have been born.