Inventions

Ben Carey returns to Hospital Hill in 2026 with INVENTIONS, his third release on the Australian experimental music label. A sonic alchemist, Carey is most known for his work with analogue synthesisers, including rare & historical equipment.

Approaching these machines with a sense of curiosity, Carey coaxes detailed sonic structures from networks of electricity, discovering latent possibilities of his chosen equipment through human-machine collaboration. Describing his approach, The Wire Magazine observed that Carey works by “not so much bending [the machine] to his will as letting it sing for itself.”

For 2023’s METASTABILITY, Carey mined the sonic depths of a single historical instrument, the La Trobe Serge ‘Paperface’ modular synthesiser, creating dynamic works from a single source. The instrument’s designer, Serge Tcherepnin, remarked that Carey “treats my synths like the real musical instruments they aspire to be.”

For INVENTIONS, Carey’s experiments opened outwards towards a diverse ecology of machines, with its six dense tracks assembled from encounters with analogue equipment at studios in Stockholm, Den Bosch, New York, Melbourne, & Sydney.

As the title implies, Carey’s new record foregrounds the act of invention as a creative practice. For Carey, the systems he works with are not treated as fixed instruments, but as the ground from which to invent, re-invent, & explore dynamic, living machines.

Taking inspiration from the French philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon, Carey approaches invention as an organic process, where his chosen machines become a site for exploring what Simondon calls the “dynamism of lived functioning” of technical objects. Carey’s works follow these trajectories as they develop, recalling earlier musical notions of invention as a searching, exploratory practice, or ricercare.

Across the album, equipment, patches, & compositions form a continuous field of activity. Sound emerges through negotiation: between intention & outcome, stability & instability, control & resistance. Drawing on material captured across a diverse range of equipment over a two-year period, INVENTIONS documents these encounters, resulting in a series of works where sound & musical forms emerge from systems in formation.