The Two Woodsmen & The Seven Sisters

“It was our desire to be Simon and Garfunkel,”

Ben Mabry tells me before I even ask much about Beta Radio, a collaborative act between  Brent Holloman and himself, which has garnered quite a bit of attention since their first release last April. Brent, Ben, and I are sitting on military issued ammunition chests in the middle of the woods. It’s not even ten a.m. and it’s sweltering. Both men are sporting plaid shirts—“is this mountain man enough?” Brent asks, and I feel bad for asking them to wear wool. They may summon images of Fleet Foxes before Simon and Garfunkel, but then again, I am the one who asked them to wear wool.

“We don’t really love to play live shows,” Ben tells me. “Well, let me clarify: we’re a band that loves recording, we only like playing live shows.” Strange, coming from a band whose corner of the music industry thrives on the live performance and the intimacy that comes from being in the same room with a band. Seven Sisters is the unexpected result of their idiosyncratic musical disposition—one into which they’re still learning how to fit.  They’ll be the first to say that they don’t know what they’re doing, but after listening to their material, it’s hard to believe that.

“When we started writing songs for Seven Sisters, we didn’t even know we were writing an album.  Finally we realized that ‘hey, this stuff is pretty good, and we’re not broke college students anymore, so let’s try and record something.’” This was in the summer of 2009, and by December, Ben and Brent began recording. Stepping into Lee Hester’s studio here in Wilmington with five or six raw, low key, acoustic songs, they weren’t necessarily set on recording a full length LP, but instead something small and minimalistic to be shared with family and friends. In April of 2010, Seven Sisters was born. Since its release, the record has done well in stores and is beginning to appear internationally, thanks to itunes. When the disc landed on my desk it became the soundtrack to morning shower dancing and eating a grilled cheese without the crusts.  It’s a perfect companion to dusting the books on a shelf or grafittiing in the garage at three a.m.—a record accommodative to quirks.  Seven Sisters is quirky enough itself. “Where Losers Do,” a buoyant favorite:

“I been wondering where I’m going/ second time around/ my pants around my ankles/ I’m feeling mighty down/ and if you’re gonna go then go big/ oh, but you might lose/ and if you lose, then lose big/ and hang out where the losers do.”

Much of Seven Sisters is equally as charming: “Either Way” opens the record with a light-hearted appeal for a relationship, and “Hello Lovely” is an ode to archetypal pursuit. At the same time it is delightfully endearing, the album dances with something greater, something enormous in scope—the desire to shape a home versus the desire to shape a world.

Over a picnic breakfast, we talk about food. Ben and I share an affinity for cereal and sandwiches and make tentative plans to open a conjoined buffet.  Brent spreads cream cheese and talks to our photographer, Jen. Breakfast with Beta Radio is like breakfast with kind, Simon & Garfunkelian woodsmen—it doesn’t take long before the conversation turns cosmic. As evidenced by the lyricism on Seven Sisters, Ben’s head has been in the sky of late, and I mean that in the most intellectual sense of the phrase. While Brent primarily crafts the music, Ben contributes melody and lyrics—many of which having to do with what is beyond us, both spiritually and metaphysically.

“I really am enamored by what I can sense and see and all of the creation here. I think the stars and the stellar bodies and anything above really points to something magnificent,” says Ben between bites of bagel. “Music is beautiful, a good painting is something to admire, but I think even more beautiful than good music or a good painting is what physically is happening.  You’ve got wave lengths, and frequencies and different tonalities, and I think the science behind it and the fact that it actually works, the physics behind it that you can count on to work every time, is just so much more amazing than any song could be.  The same thing with a painting; the fact that there’s more than just these colors, you’ve got different elements and compounds that make it.”

The ancient Greeks believed that time exists on two planes: Chronos, or chronological time, and Kairos, which is the time in between—an immeasurable moment in which something cosmic takes place. Aristotle believed that as humans, we exist in chronological time, but somewhat uncomfortably, as we were created to occupy Kairos along with the celestial.

The Greeks also named the stars—Pleiades, or the Seven Sisters, a constellation that can be seen on any clear night, were said to be the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione. The sisters were immortalized after committing suicide out of grief over the burden of their father—to hold the Earth on his shoulders and forever separate Gaia from Uranus. His banishment from Kairos meant his spiritual death.

Rewind back to Seven Sisters and “Pleiades,” a lullabilic song—reminiscent of “Winkin’, Blinkin’, and Nod”—about cosmic temptation, “the wine of a new design that makes the broken hearted whole,” and “the stars [that] align for the second time.” The voice in Seven Sisters wrestles with the union of Kairos and Chronos and struggles to reconcile his own place within the two. In “A Place for Me,” he asks “the finder of all lost things” to help him search for his lost car keys—a beautifully unexpected, seemingly mundane, marriage of Chronos and Kairos.

According to Madeleine L’engle, art is, by nature, celestial—chaos touched by cosmos. It is the idea that art exists in Kairos rather than Chronos; that we understand our world only by illuminating it by the light of another.

“But we’re still discovering ourselves,” Ben assures me. “We’re still learning.”

Beta Radio has little agenda. Just to make “something ageless. I just want people to be moved by it, I just want to elicit an emotional response.” I ask Brent if he would like to weigh in, and he smiles, clasps his hands and nods in agreement with Ben. “I think we’re really successful and if we never go farther than this, that’s okay,” he says. “But don’t you want to?” I ask. Neither really respond to the question, but no need, it’s clear that they will.