Light Traveller Press Kit
Biography
Light Traveller is the solo home-recording project of Australian alt/cult recluse Ben Winch, who fronted the Adelaide shoegaze band Movement and published two prize-winning novels (Liadhen and My Boyfriend’s Father) in the nineties, becoming the youngest ever recipient of an Australia Council fellowship for literature.
After burning out in a cabin in Tasmania in winter 1997 Winch spent a decade jamming and recording, releasing the results on CDR via his DIY label Cottage Industry Recordings. Arts Council funding for the spoken-word and music concept album Brothers of the Head, featuring Adelaide Hills poet/percussionist Tim Sinclair, paid for his recording rig, a Tascam digital 8-track and Rode condenser microphone.
In 2009, having lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Vancouver and various Australian country towns, Winch settled in Manchester England and formed the classic indie-rock band Shadow History with Liverpool bassist and original Icicle Works member Chris Layhe, drawing on a back-catalogue of songs dating from his twenties.
Back in Australia in 2014 he published Vanishing Points, the first instalment of the psychedelic pulp trilogy COQworks, under the pseudonym W. COQ. Stemming from his time in Tasmania, the book represents a fraction of his box of old manuscripts.
Married now with three stepsons, when not tinkering with his half-finished backlog of songs, prose and poems, Winch sometimes writes new material. Light Traveller is his newest music, and the first fruit of his souped-up secondhand 2011 MacBook Pro, which replaced the Tascam in 2015. First EP Same Stars Shine was a return to his roots: guitar-heavy post-postpunk with a haunting hint of melody, a dark sound his teenage self would have sold his soul for. The second, Better on Your Way, is soft, sophisticated and slightly left-of-centre, heading further in the post-rock direction that upcoming album Falcon Falling makes its own.
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