Benjamin Koll, a origin story

As I was working on the "Room Service" sets for you, I remembered something I forgot to include on the first listening companion book for "Songs For A Better Future", and that is the story of how I began to consider stepping out in the spotlight as an artist after all the years of career as a music producer and remixer. It all began taking form in 2013, and the reason why I forgot it was that I had been having brain chemistry problems since the previous year that made me unable to properly store  memories for over three years. Good thing is I kept some of my diaries and took photos of almost every day at that time after doctors warned me. But only recently I've been looking into that.

Me and my ex (Carlos, Woofioso Photography) knew a guy that had started releasing at that time a very interesting comic book series (in Spanish) about a imaginary bear world named "Beartoncity". His name is Daniel Maine, and although he left behind that path some years ago, he's now making it big in the big comic book industry leagues working for Marvel among others. 

It was after we took the "Room Service" photo series you've just seen complete for the first time that we realized I could be able to be in front of the camera. We also thought that it could be cool to have a bear singer character on that world Daniel had created, and that's why I began trying to write something for a man at that time, and that I opened the vault to listen again and search through my old demos from 1990 to 1994 for the first time in almost 20 years. This was a long process during I even considered using other singers for the project.

Before any song was written I commissioned Daniel the creation of a costume for me, of a character that could be written into one of the Beartoncity books, and even make an animated short with. He was excited by the idea and worked out some designs he showed to me about three months later, mid august of 2013. I thought it'd be cool to conceal my true identity and play around with the idea of a bear superhero, so that's why the smokey eyes.

Things moved really slow at that time, in part because I was still recovering and also because it was a big creative shift for me so my inspiration was unstable, but I kept looking at the designs you can now see here and imagining how it all could work out. Moving forward we made a trip on November 2014 to meet with a guy who worked with leather to commission one of the outfits, it took a lot of research until we found this guy, who also had worked with white colored artificial leather.

That night, after we met with the guy, we went to a hotel and shot another photo series (remember this, I'll share it with you at some point, it will be named "Red Hotel"). And this series provoked a new shift in the idea. This time I felt I could make it without hiding my identity, instead, we thought it could be even more interesting to go further and present the project as a bear unafraid of exposing himself... the photo shoot was so powerful we cancelled the costume order.

But as I was telling you, I couldn't move faster at that time. It took me almost two years to come up with the first song, that was "Beautiful Nothing", and at that point the idea of a cartoon bear super hero began to sound a little too much. I had also began to wonder If I was ready to so much exposure... well, you've been reading about this, things began to put themselves in place. I learned I just needed to let it flow :)

PS: my memory of those days is still based on documents and photographs, so bear with me, there are still things to be uncovered.