Ben Roberts – TRANSITION, Album Launch, Barrelhouse Ballroom: Review

By Special Guest on 3rd February 2026 • ( Leave a comment )

Ben Roberts – Transition album launch – Barrelhouse Ballroom, Totnes – 23rd January 2026

Revolutionary stuff from the boundary-pushing punk cellist

Report and main pic by Andy Hill, b/w photos by Harry Duns.

SOMETHING TRANSCENDENTAL

On a soggy evening in Totnes, at the bleak fag‑end of an especially drab January, a respectably full Barrelhouse Ballroom assembles to witness something transcendental.

The poster for Ben Roberts’ TRANSITION album launch reveals our hero eyes upturned, angel wings unfurled; inside, we await to see if the night can live up to such divinity, as rain relentlessly batters the casement windows.

First up, Pillow, mates of Ben from Brighton: double bassist Alfie Weedon and keyboardist James Osler, with Ben joining as guest cello. Pillow’s music stylishly straddles classical and ambient worlds, all rich contrabass resonance and glinting piano figures that faintly recall Erik Satie, as Ben summons flickers of whale song from high up the neck.

To call it ‘soundtracky’ would be underselling it. But it does feel a little like music composed for an arty documentary about tectonic plates. Or an elegy written for an especially fearsome ancient warrior. Perhaps it runs a shade soporific for a Friday‑night crowd – half the room has babysitters ticking away at home – but Pillow are genuinely spellbinding, and worth keeping an eye on.

A quick run to the bar for a kombucha, and the main event begins.

“The old paradigm is crumbling,” declares Ben Roberts onstage, this time resplendent in a towering feather headdress, at the head of his own band.

HONED FROM IMPROVISATION

His new album, TRANSITION was honed from a series of improvisations at Sorting Room Studios, just up the road in Dartington. The overriding thesis? Make music to soundtrack the radical transitions going on in the world right now, and hopefully inspire whatever world comes after it to be kinder, and more creative. Ambitious as fuck, right?

He’s a very plausible revolutionary, is Ben, priapic feather hat reaching for the stage lights. A post-rock shaman, if you will, an ambient chieftain – his curvy electric cello mounted front-and-centre like some manner of Mad Max crossbow.

These aren’t songs, per se. More instrumental explorations, his cello careering between baroque sweetness and frantic poltergeist shrieks. His band – rock-solid Rowland O’Connor, the album’s producer, on bass and synth, Sam Walker thunderous on drums, Mae Karthauser sketching dance-music piano figures on keys and Steph Kelly with though-provoking spoken word interludes – lend breadth and heft to the performance.

Every now and then the energy dips, when it does they snappily launch into an improvisation, playing the crowd like, well, a cello. As well as the odd groove, philosophy is central to the show, another string to Ben’s bow. Or, why not, another feather in his cap.

“This one’s a singalong,” he teases, before leading a sympathetic Totnes audience in a chorus of Om. “You get to be the sound of the universe,” he smiles.. It’s music, to be clear, that is unlikely to ever trouble the charts. But for this rapt crowd, that’s besides the point. Soundtracking the closing act of civilisation as we know it, on an obligingly stormy night, TRANSITION is a magnificently human work of art. Sprawling and complex, feverish and a bit mad. Warm blooded – surging with animal spirit.