The Soundtrack Collection

Sub Pop proudly presents The Soundtrack Collection, the latest musical venture by Jon Benjamin, the visionary who brought you 2015’s jazz-piano masterpiece Well I Should Have… Learned How to Play Piano (and who also has a side-hustle voicing the titular roles of Bob and Archer in the TV shows Bob’s Burgers and Archer). Well I Should Have… got high praise from the tastemakers of our times, NPR’s All Things Considered and a bunch of people on YouTube. The limited vinyl pressing sold out immediately, garnering outrageous prices on the collectors’ market until a new (even cooler and more importantly still available!) limited-edition red, white and blue pressing appeared in July, 2020. The Soundtrack Collection finds Jon striding boldly into the rarefied worlds of classic film music, and the Moog synthesizer. We’ll let the maestro himself elaborate:

WHY ANOTHER ALBUM? The question must be screaming in your mind. In 2015, I started my jazz journey. Even I thought it would end, but the spirits of sound, they keep pulling at me. At times, I’ve danced with the demons of malaise and grappled with the warlocks of uncertainty. This collection represents a rebirth/afterbirth. A reforming of what I have done and what has been done before me. A voyage into a more futuristic soundscape, like a drunk (very drunk), crazed cosmonaut’s first spacewalk. A burnt offering to the Gods of Providence—Gods that take from us mercilessly the corpuscular light of what we give, fractured through our prism of inability. My work may be an affront, but is our collective affront. My sins are unwavering but my jazz is my confession; each note a cleansing; the sound of the squeezing of an overripe peach and the juice putrid. These songs, like spumes of spite, are sufferings, profane grumbles, and they weave their thread into your soul like falcon’s talons into the belly of a bunny. Every compression is an impression (not sure what this means) but I think I’m talking about compressing the keys on the keyboard. But in them all are ‘sharts of hope’. I crash expectations. I throw poo in the face of my oppressors. I scream like a baby bird to the legions. I, by my own hand, mock the clouds for forming, cry ecstatic till temples crumble. I, by my own hands, shake the world. I am, like William Morris once wrote, ‘the haystack in the floods.' I am, for all time, the Jazz Daredevil.

-Jon Benjamin - Jazz Daredevil