Ben Rozsa

Ben Rozsa makes ambient acoustic singer-songwriter music. Like everyone else, he has good excuses for this. But you likely don’t want to wade through those. Let’s cut to the chase: Can he make use of imagery that doesn’t reference flying or rhyme ‘door’ with ‘floor’? Affirmative. And has he high hopes and noble intentions? By the truckload!

“I wanna get tons of chicks, and make the kids that never paid attention to me in high school bow down and worship me,” Ben articulates. Classy, but can he dance? Indubitably.

But seriously, Ben Rozsa is a man of humble beginnings. Raised in between the more obscure places of California and the city-fare of northwest Portland, his sounds are no less varied then his Inspirations: homeless men posing as angels, dysfunctional relationships, spiritual writings, and childhood fantasies . A completely self-taught musician, His sounds are an eclectic collage of a man fascinated with multi-instrumentation: a kalimba, children’s xylophones, glockenspiel , and two-dollar garage sale keyboards.   He sings and strums in a genre he lovingly refers to as “offbeat, out of key, poorly mixed and balanced, tiresome and un-appreciable to most audiences.” Please don’t take his word for it. In reality, Ben pens folksy lullabies for the train-hopping soul, the out-of-work spirit, and the dumpster-diving mojo. Sadness with a twinge of irony and hopelessness with a pinch of redemption are a couple of his lyrical themes. This is more than waste-deep music.

True, he warbles a bit at times, but we all know better than to judge an artist by their auto-tune. His music is refreshingly pretension-free and fixates not on perfect pitch, but on a rare brand of limitless self-expression that is as liberated from convention as nuns on steroids. The more free he is to be himself in song, the more propensity he acquires for touching on the half-imagined dreams and waking thoughts of others. He does this consistently, with clumsy imprecision and shaky confidence. Such is independent music, and such is, humbly yours, Ben Rozsa.