Benedict Sinister chooses to conceal his own face, preferring to take a back seat to the other artists that he pays homage to in his work. "I seek invisibility in order to make my idols more visible," he says. "I'm not interested in taking the limelight for myself. I don't want or need fame. I'm a modest vessel channeling the genius of others."
Sinister spent 20 years working as an itinerant musician and performed all over the world, from DJing at beach bars in Senegal to playing covers of The Smiths in Mexico and of Leonard Cohen in Japan. He started to attract attention after he moved to US and to hipster Brooklyn in 2018. The creative hub saw his immersion in the music of other artists lead him to start creating his own unique musical genre he terms “Platform,” “Meta,” “Adaptations,” “Old School Post-Modernism” and “Inappropriation.”
Sinister’s first single used lines from 16 songs by septuagenarian art rock fixture Bryan Ferry arranged into rhyming verses. Los Angeles based DJs Miss Beltran and Christian B released lounge and club remixes under the titles “Ne Dramatise Pas” and “16 Lines from Bryan Ferry,” the latter making No 5 Breakout on the Billboard Dance Club chart last year. Sinister’s videos for the songs were the world’s first to use footnotes, combined with pastiches of other videos - from the lyrics video for the Chainsmokers’ “Paris” to “Blurred Lines.”
His follow up, “Your Parents,” an electropop track inspired by a French cabaret song by Vincent Delerm, came accompanied with a hilarious animated video he also created, packed with so many witty references (from Trump to Spiderman and climate change to Last Tango in Paris), that it reached over half a million YouTube views in two months.
Listen below, or click to stream on Spotify.