Human in the Loop



Globe-wandering, Colorado-based producer, multi-instrumentalist, and sci-fi author Benjamin Kamphaus produces immersive, atmospheric space music as PatternShift. He combines mysterious and melancholic soundscapes, nuanced ambient textures, and meditative, relentless synthwave drive to produce his signature sound. Kamphaus cut his musical teeth on a mid-80s electronic workstation: an Atari ST & Korg DS-8. He started down the classically trained route as a pianist, percussionist, and composer, flirted with prog in his teens, then abandoned both for indie shoegaze guitar. He was drawn back into synthesizer music by his abiding love of M83's ambient instrumental work and his appreciation of the sparser, synth heavy scores of Blade Runner and the first Terminator and Mass Effect entries. He established his spacey, cinematic sound as PatternShift with Vaskania Prime in 2018: a sleeper hit that took another year of features on ThePrimeThanatos and Astral Throb YouTube channels to reach a large audience. He followed up with Rites of the Renouncer and Wake of the Wanderer in 2019 alongside books of the same names. 2021's Exponent pushes PatternShift's cinematic sound into grittier cyberpunk territory. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.