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It’s almost sunset and one half of the B3nson family members are standing in a hole. Like intrepid mountaineers, they do this simply because it is there.

Earlier in the week, Tim Koch had ridden his bike to the Altamont home of bandmates Jen O’Connor and Eric Krans, who live in a 19th-century farmhouse and are gradually bringing agriculture back to their land. He asked if they needed any work done, and O’Connor set him to digging holes where they would later plant trees. The voluntary labor yielded two holes, a couple feet deep and a few feet around.

What family members could not fit in the first hole have now squeezed into the second. With membership in excess of a dozen, this is not an easy task. It’s a couple days after Halloween and the whole family are in Altamont for a picnic, but the fact that everyone is wearing silly hats—constable, musketeer, swami, colonist—has nothing to do with the holiday. According to B3nson family values, these sorts of things go without saying. And so it follows, when a rubber ball is retrieved from the tall grass and then hurled from one hole to the other, an impromptu game of dodgeball breaks out. A family that plays together stays together, right?

B3nson is many things. It is a house: 3 Benson St., to be precise. It is a group of friends, many of whom have lived at said address (although none currently do). It is a collective containing some of Albany’s most innovative musicians, including Sgt. Dunbar and the Hobo Banned, the Hoborchestra, Scientific Maps, We Are Jeneric, Beware! The Other Head of Science, Desperately Obvious, Barons in the Attic, My Friend Peter, Littlefoot, and Swamp Baby. It is a record company devoted to helping its friends make music. But above all, it is the idea that music is only as important as the friends you make it with, and that the more friends you have to share your music with, the better it will be.

The picnic is this idea in practice. When Richard Nolan, the guitarist, keyboardist and self-declared nimblest member of Beware! The Other Head of Science, is finally beaned to end the game, the holes are evacuated, but only for a moment. The fray disperses into its sea of friends, who are busy tending the bonfire, giving each other haircuts, and embroidering T-shirts with the pattern of another friend’s chest hair. They retrieve guitars, banjos, trombone, tuba, trumpet, French horn, saxophone, accordion and violin, then return to do what they do best. They fill one hole, surround it, and belt out a number the Hobo Banned had learned only a couple weeks before. A triumphant refrain, learned on the spot for a Jewish wedding, “Hava Nagila” is the song the family members sing.

In 2002, Koch, Alex Muro and Dan Pardee first met as UAlbany freshmen. By 2004, the friends’ musical aspirations led them to form a post-hardcore band called Proost! Like the mythical first show that every great band will speak sheepishly of, Proost! performed only once, at a dive bar in the so-called student ghetto. By then, the trio had been listening to a steady diet of Neutral Milk Hotel, the Microphones and Ramona Cordova, and the idea had been planted to start a ragtag workingman’s-folk outfit. As Proost! performed three songs that would later find their way to the catalog of Sgt. Dunbar and the Hobo Banned, the latter were officially birthed.

The house where they lived (3 Benson) became a hub of musical activity. “We invented a game called ‘pass-the-guitar,’” says Muro, while admitting he’s sure guitars had been passed in other places at prior times. “It had pretty strict rules because there were a lot of musicians around. It was a good way to hear everyone, though, so you had to play one full song and then pass it.” Not everyone followed these rules, but over time the gatherings produced a large body of material and a broad roster of players. Horns and percussion worked their way into the mix, and over time side projects sprouted off of the Hobo locus.

“We had the idea at the time,” says Muro, “but not until much later did we start the collective and record company.” Multi-instrumentalist Donna Baird, who splits time among many bands in the collective, soon moved into the house and is now credited with coining the “B3nson” moniker. While travels abroad, college graduation and post-collegiate plans have dispersed the group from its Benson Street roots, Sgt. Dunbar’s musical credo to “give more than you take away” has become a philosophy for the whole collective to live by. The house was passed to second-wave family members Peter Mollica and Seth Tillinghast, and plans to become a collective became official.

“[The collective] worked out this way because everyone was friends first,” says Muro, who, after graduation, used the rest of his student loan money to buy a small digital recording console. With a do-it-yourself aesthetic that fit their means of production, and a small army with which to tackle the logistical ends of making music, booking gigs, designing posters and publicizing events, the collective became an increasingly self-sufficient unit.

“It’s a lot easier to get stuff done with everybody than it is on your own,” says Krans, who plays bass in the Hobo Banned and performs with O’Connor as We Are Jeneric. With such a wide support system, the collective are fairly prolific, releasing several albums per year on the label. While the prevailing logic of the industry would compel a group of this clout to find higher commercial avenues, this would counteract what B3nson are trying to establish.

“The thing is a lot more about being friends with everybody and hanging out than it is about . . . well, I don’t really know what else there is,” Muro says. The collective’s membership has grown quite a bit in recent years, with preexisting friendships sparking new musical projects, and compatible musical ideas forming the basis for friendship. Indeed, it is a matter of “scene” that seems most important to the B3nson family. “The fact that nobody from Albany has really ‘made it’ in an interesting way in a long time,” Muro continues, “kind of makes it seem like there’s no momentum here,” but this assertion is only true when viewed through an increasingly antiquated lens.

Nick Matulis, of Swamp Baby and Knotworking, represents a different facet of the family. Having grown up in the area and experienced the Albany music scene in the years prior to the B3nson collective, he sees the musical experiment in a larger context. “There are a lot of people who start here and, when they feel they’re really ready to make their charge, they move to [New York City]. I know a lot of actors who have done that too. When they started to believe in themselves, they abandoned.” It’s a sentiment that virtually precludes the possibility of this group moving to the city. Although a band like Sgt. Dunbar often will draw better crowds in New York, such a move would undermine the rootedness that anchors so much of what the collective does.

Krans adds that “people think ‘where there’s a music scene, that’s where music happens,’ but, ultimately what this collective is trying to prove is that it’s actually the encouragement of the music community that creates the music scene.”

“We are the scene,” says O’Connor. “We are the ones that attend each other’s shows and that’s why it’s sort of happening.”

Matt Ferguson, of Beware! and Desperately Obvious (whose sound is markedly different from that of the Hobo Banned), points to a sense of competition as something that has prevented great bands from lasting in the area. “A lot of them aren’t around anymore because there hasn’t been the support system.”

“New York used to have an advantage,” Matulis says, “because of the sheer quantity of people.” With the Internet age, though, ideas are exchanged at the click of a mouse, a fact that severely diminishes the value of artistic hubs, and so small artistic locales have been steadily reinvigorated all over the country. “So, if we don’t have a million people on a single block here, we can put 20 people in a living room and have the same effect. There’s still that energy transfer and frenetic discovery.”

While this potentially divisive factor hasn’t yet become an issue, the collective has accounted for what might happen if a major record label does begin courting a particular member.

“We’re more of a confederacy than a union,” says Krans. “We’re not going to fight over a secession.”

“We became a collective because we were so excited about each other’s music,” says O’Connor. “We’d be just as excited for somebody to leave as we were to have them come in.”

On Nov. 21, the B3nson family will celebrate their latest release in grand form with a party at Valentine’s. A B3nson Family Funsgiving is a compilation of music produced by the collective, and on a crisp night in October, Sgt. Dunbar and the Hobo Banned are busy rehearsing.

The eight core members of the band are crammed into their small basement rehearsal space on Myrtle Avenue, where styrofoam pads the walls and all manner of musical apparatus litters the floor. A computer sits perched on a mirror-encrusted bar, ready to record at a moment’s notice, but on this night the band members are working on new material. Upstairs, collective members and friends mill about. Some play Tetris on an original Nintendo while others mix tracks for the upcoming compilation. Still others wander downstairs to watch the band rehearse and so made the space especially cozy.

Muro is concerned that, during a horn interlude, the players are losing track of the tempo. From the stairs, Matulis, who is only watching, suggests that everyone simply stomp along. It is in moments like these that the B3nson family truly live up to their collective identity. In their midst, there are no spectators. The idea is eventually rejected, as it is decided by trial that stomping while playing tuba and French horn is next to impossible. Yet, the spirit of experimentation is alive. Muro’s brother Adam, who plays woodwinds and banjo, begins to keep time on an antique typewriter, situated on the bar. The band accompany him through the problematic passage, but with the approaching chorus, a new problem presents itself. Adam has to return to his banjo without quitting the percussion. At a moment’s notice, and with the same disregard for the line between performer and audience that B3nson bands deliver onstage, Adam turns to this fly-on-the-wall writer for a pair of hands to lend his typewriter. Without thinking, I oblige. According to B3nson family values, these sorts of things go without saying.

>> Back to 2008 Local Music Guide

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