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Tim Motzer -
acoustic-electric guitar, baritone electric guitar, live looping, bowing, electronics, mbira

Gregg Bendian -
vibraphone, glockenspiel, roto-toms, bells, bongos, woodblocks, triangles, orchestral bass drum, gongs, cymbals, bowing


The Eternal, the debut release of improvisational duo Tim Motzer & Gregg Bendian, is the astonishing result of their first collaboration. Blending Motzer’s hypnotic, guitar-driven soundscapes with Bendian’s evocative, spacious tapestry of orchestral percussion, The Eternal traverses dynamic and dramatic landscapes – at times soothing, at other moments haunting and unsettled. These adventurous explorations might sit in the same musical realm as Takemitsu, Feldman, or Stockhausen, or the cinematic atmospheres of Jerry Goldsmith or Bernard Herrmann. Through their profound alchemy, Motzer and Bendian have spontaneously composed music that thrums with a sense of something primordial yet uncaged by time.

As the album’s overture, ‘Beneath the Hallowed Ground’ beckons and immediately enchants through Bendian’s bowed vibraphones and Motzer’s long e-bow tones with octave fuzz and feedback against sinuous micro-loop manipulation. Sparse melodic guitar lines creep over vibrato vibraphone intervals, floating into an eventual resting place.

Bowed cymbals and gongs (Bendian) and guitar drone micro loops (Motzer) inform the beginning of ‘Stars Above, Stars Within,’ the album’s shortest piece, with descending suspended harmony resolving into varying continual spirals to final resolution.

‘A Shaman’s Spell’ pulls us in with Bendian’s mallets on vibraphone, glockenspiel, triangles, bells, interwoven with Motzer’s bowed guitar figures over dark drones and glitched sonics. Ghostly bowed cello-like guitar and percussive melodic lines appear, cascade, and eventually dissolve into the mist.

The expansive final piece, ‘The Eternal,’ introduces Bendian’s cymbals, orchestral concert bass drum, tuned roto-toms, bells, and bongos. Over Motzer’s chordal harmonic drones and pulsing electronic glitch maneuvers, ‘The Eternal’ mingles multifold timbres and melodies of guitar and mbira with Bendian’s epic percussive dialogue. As the album’s crescendo, it’s a wondrous, 28-minute sonic adventure.

“We somehow achieved a music that is both earthy and celestial – meditative and dramatic. It feels like a soundtrack of the earth, and of the heavens, and beyond. Our approach to the mixing of this record only heightens this feeling.” – Gregg Bendian

“These recordings are an incredible realization to me. I’ve listened to this album many times and continue to hear new and deeper details in the dialogue between Gregg and me. It’s an honor to work with Gregg for the first time, and it’s a first time for me working with orchestral percussion. The way our sounds merged together was surprising and riveting.” – Tim Motzer

Review exverpt:
“The Eternal itself is going to be one of those albums that’ll be talked about in the years to come. It’ll probably be up there with; Tangerine Dream’s Zeit, Magma’s Mëkanïk Dëstruktïẁ Kömmandöh, Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air, Aphrodite’s Child’s 666, and of course the first two Cluster albums. Motzer and Bendian are geniuses by bringing their creation to life. And we were the luckiest ones on the planet earth to experience the dangerous journey in which The Eternal is based on.”
- Echoes and Dust
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“Woah…Just listened to this whole recording.
Not at all what I thought it might be. Super cool. Super fresh and strange. love it” - Trey Gunn