Ben Stapp is an American, New York-based tuba player who combines avant-garde and traditional sounds with abstract narratives, creating something truly his own. He is known for his recorded collaborations with guitarist Joe Morris, trombonist Steve Swell, and double bass player William Parker, and his own opera, Myrrha’s Red Book (Evolver, 2015). Uzmic Ro’Samg is Stapp’s debut solo album of unaccompanied tuba and sousaphone. It was recorded at Main Drag in Brooklyn in January 2025.
Uzmic Ro’Samg features ten bold but playful pieces that highlight Stapp’s technical mastery, creativity, and musical resourcefulness. He employs an athletic array of extended breathing techniques, including circular breathing, multiphonics, vocalizations, and creating tonal instability with the tuba’s mouthpiece, as well as electroacoustic feedback, which push and expand the tuba sousaphone’s familiar sonic palettes into risk-taking, uncharted territories. He prepared for this album over one hundred scales and specific ways one set of pitches modulated to another, titled Theta Harmony.
These pieces also stress Stapp’s gift for telling eccentric and colorful stories rooted in his original science fiction narrative, called Eono. He cites sci-fi writer Octavia Butler and Tibetan Buddhism as main influences, and compares Uzmic Ro’Samg to the Buddhist concept of Dharmakaya, the «Dharma Body» of a Buddha, which represents the ultimate, formless, and absolute nature of reality.
Each piece sketches a concise, vivid story tied to figures and events in Stapp’s long-developing science fiction opus – a meditation on consciousness, transformation, and encounters with extraterrestrial entities he calls «Keepers». Each location in space-time can be described as a resonance or scale. Extraterrestrial travelers had to learn how to modulate between these scales to get from one place to another.
These imaginative musical connections—or encounters—charge the album with a physical intensity and a subversive aroma of mystery, navigating seamlessly between raw instrumental innovation, experimental improvisation, and speculative fiction. It often sounds otherworldly, with strange tonal colors and sonic shapes, but it builds its own musical universe with its own inner logic and playful, engaging myths.
Eyal Hareuveni
Ben Stapp (tuba, sousaphone, pedals, extensions)
