LIAM BENZVI

Liam Benzvi is a New York–based singer-songwriter and composer. With his baritone at the helm, Benzvi’s music oscillates between sultry shoegaze and anthemic dream pop. His debut LP, Acts of Service, comes out this month on Terrible Records.

1. PATRICK COWLEY AND JORGE SOCARRAS, CATHOLIC (Macro recordings, 2009)

   This record has been my guiding light for nearly a decade. It’s sweaty and slow and punky and pretty and experimental. With my old band Strange Names, I got to collaborate with Jorge on a song called “People to Go” (2018), which was hugely rewarding. “I’ll Come See You,” “Burn Brighter Flame,” and their cover of Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” (1968) are my favorite tracks on this album.

   Patrick Cowley and Jorge Socarras, 1975.
2. LONG WALKS

   It’s when I get my best ideas. I talk to myself and hum little tunes. I dissociate and daydream. Anything I write needs a walk to go along with it. Last summer, I watched Jane Campion’s In the Cut (2003) before I started my day. When it was over, I felt completely unhinged and walked five miles, like I was Frannie Avery, Meg Ryan’s character from the movie. Around mile three, I swiped a pair of sunglasses from a CVS.

   Jane Campion, In the Cut, 2003, 35 mm, color, sound, 119 minutes. Frannie Avery (Meg Ryan).
3. ADAM CURTIS

   Documentarian filmmaker, storyteller, social critic: Everything Curtis asserts, even when it’s dense, makes me feel ahead of the zeitgeist. The ways in which he reveals legacies of power and corruption in society are somehow both complex and entirely accessible. The Century of the Self (2002), HyperNormalisation (2016), and his latest, Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021), are essential viewing.

   Can’t Get You Out of My Head, 2021, still from Adam Curtis’s TV show on the BBC. Episode 1, “Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain.”
4. ELLE BARBARA

   I saw Elle as the opener for a larger act in Brooklyn a few years back, and she blew me away. She is a charismatic singer and an amazing songwriter, and so inspiring—I ended up reaching out to her like a crazed fan after the performance, and we became friends over FaceTime at the outset of the pandemic. Her singles “Délice Créole” (Creole Delight) and “Peach Purée (de Pêches),” both 2021, along with her back catalogue, have been criminally overlooked. She’s based in Montreal and devotes most of her time to community organizing and mutual aid within the ballroom scene as the mother of the House of Barbara. We’ll sing a duet one of these days.

   Elle Barbara, 2021. Photo: Fatine-Violette Sabiri and Anna Arrobas.
5. TARSEM SINGH, THE CELL (2000)

   Beautiful and scary. J.Lo is great. Vincent D’Onofrio is peak villain. I can watch this movie again and again. I’m never not mesmerized.

   Tarsem Singh, The Cell, 2000, 35 mm, color, sound, 107 minutes. Carl Stargher (Vincent D’Onofrio).
6. NEW ORDER’S SIMULCAST PERFORMANCE OF “BLUE MONDAY” FOR THE BBC

   In a television clip from 1984, we see Bernard Sumner beginning to belt out the song’s verses when it’s clearly not working or sounding good. This forces him to alter his delivery, incrementally, to the brooding lower register we’ve all come to know and love. As a vocalist, it has taken me a long time to learn how to audibly sing softly onstage and not slip out of key. So the discomfort Sumner faces and overcomes through trial and error in this performance has always been compelling to me. Aside from that, they all look great, and their musical gear is fab.

   New Order performing “Blue Monday” for “Rock Around the Clock” on BBC Two, August 25, 1984.
7. MERRITT MEACHAM

   Merritt is a clothing designer with a kind of clairvoyance when it comes to fit and function. His pieces hug everybody right. As an artist, he’s brooding and tormented. We’re in a relationship, so I’ve been able to watch his work evolve over the years while wearing his clothes around New York, onstage, and in videos.

   Merritt Meacham double split knit, 2020. Photo: Conner Lyons for Stand Up Comedy.
8. LAUREN SERVIDEO

   I’m not comforted by much when I’m lost in a scroll, except when I’m watching one of Servideo’s videos. I feel like she’s the empress of Instagram comedy. I want her to have a sketch show already. She’s the new Tracey Ullman.

   Screenshot from a June 9, 2021, Instagram video by Lauren Servideo.
9. PHILIP K. DICK, VALIS (BANTAM BOOKS, 1981)

   VALIS is an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System—PKD’s gnostic vision of how our world operates. In the book, the author’s alter ego, Horselover Fat, is visited by a pink beam of light that reveals to him, among other things, that the Roman Empire never ended; instead, time just froze, and our current time line exists on top of that one. This novel was published only a year before Dick died, so its narrative structure, plot, and themes are intertwined with his various schizophrenic episodes—episodes he believed to be real. PKD creates this amazing, perplexing dance between reality and fiction that swallows you whole.

   Cover of the 1981 Corgi edition of Philip K. Dick’s VALIS.
10. GUY SIGSWORTH

    With Imogen Heap, he created electronic music under the name Frou Frou—the duo are responsible for the astonishing 2002 album Details, their last record together. Sigsworth also produced and cowrote Madonna’s “What It Feels Like for a Girl” (2001), produced Britney Spears’s “Everytime” (2004), and created a remix of Björk’s “All Is Full of Love” (1997), among other feats. I feel like his brand is sweeping melancholy. Floating, glitchy pads over shifting bass lines. Like if you fed shoegaze into a 3D printer and dressed it up in bows. I’ve spent a lot of time with his work under the covers with my eyes closed, letting it wash over me. 

    Guy Sigsworth performing with Imogen Heap at the Roundhouse, London, November 15, 2019. Photo: Burak Cingi/Redferns/Getty Images.