Ben Po

A biography that fits in four lines

The public record on Ben Po is thin, and unusually candid about what it covers. The artist biography that listing and ticketing services carry describes an electronic composer, an acoustic instrumentalist and a live-set act — three descriptions rather than one — who came out of San Francisco, California, and now works from Berlin.

That biography puts duality at the centre of the practice: acoustic instruments set against electronic ones, playing between light and darkness, improvisation written into composition. It names a training in jazz, flamenco and blues alongside an interest in electronic sound design and dance music. Listings file the work under electronic, ambient and deep house, which is less a contradiction than an admission that the material moves between a listening register and a floor register depending on the room.

The San Francisco-to-Berlin move is the only biographical fact in general circulation, and it is worth being clear about what it does not include. There is no published date for the move, no named school or conservatoire, no band history, no prior alias. Nothing in the available record explains how a musician trained in flamenco and blues arrived at a deep house tag, which is exactly the question an interview would answer and no interview appears to exist.

What can be said is that the self-description is specific where vaguer acts stay general. "Acoustic instrumentalist" is a claim that can be checked on a stage, and "live-set act" rules out the DJ booth. Both are commitments, and both carry consequences for what a support slot looks like.

Two releases, two years apart

Two releases carry Ben Po's name on Apple Music, both filed under a single artist entry. The first is Warmth, an EP issued in 2024 and running to six tracks: Magnolia, Warmth, Night, Recuerdos de Granada I, Recuerdos de Granada II and Lotus Feet.

The track titles do more work than most. Three are single-word mood pieces. Two are a numbered Spanish pair — Recuerdos de Granada, memories of Granada, naming the Andalusian city at the centre of flamenco's guitar tradition — which lines up with the flamenco training in the biography and reads as a two-part study rather than two unrelated tracks. A record sequenced that way is a composer's record rather than a bag of club tools.

The second release is Chrysalis / Unfold, a two-track single dated 2026. It is presented as a pairing rather than a single with a B-side, and the two titles describe one process in two stages. Beyond the titles and the year, the public listing gives nothing: no label line against either release, no producer or engineer credits, no mastering house.

That is the whole discography in the open — six tracks and a two-track single, roughly two years apart, with no album and no visible remix catalogue. For an act about to play four North American rooms, it is a small body of recorded work, which puts the weight on the live set rather than the back catalogue and makes the current run the thing worth watching.

November 2026: the dated run

The hard facts sit in the first half of November 2026, where four North American shows appear against Ben Po's name.

The earliest of the four is Saturday 7 November at Berhta in Washington DC, 1237 W Street Northeast, with a 10pm start. That night is sold through DICE from $35, with Parra for Cuva billed as the headline act. Five days later, on Thursday 12 November, the bill moves to 99 Scott in Brooklyn for an 8pm show, filed by the venue's listings under techno and electronic. Brooklyn has the tightest supply of the four: checked on 4 November 2026, a resale listing showed fifteen tickets remaining, entry on the secondary market from $61 and an average paid price of about $128.

The two Canadian dates close the stretch. Friday 13 November is The Axis Club in Toronto, a 7pm start, where the listing names Parra for Cuva and Ben Po together. Saturday 14 November is Théâtre Beanfield in Montréal at 8pm.

Four rooms in eight days, all of them club- or theatre-scale rather than arena, and all of them on someone else's headline run. The Washington listing is the only one of the four that publishes a face-value entry price, and it does not print the support act at all — a reminder that on this kind of bill the opening name usually reaches the audience through the artist's own channels and the aggregators rather than through the venue.

The support slot, and what it buys

The company matters more than the slot length. Parra for Cuva works at the composition-led end of electronic music, in rooms that will hold still for a piano figure before they move, so a support act bringing acoustic instruments onto the stage is a deliberate fit rather than a filler booking. The published door times point the same way: 7pm in Toronto, 8pm in Brooklyn and Montréal are early for club shows, which leaves an opening set somewhere to live before the headline.

The honest position on the live reception is that there is none yet in print. No review of any date on this run has been published, and no interview with Ben Po appears in the music press. Searches across the usual critical and listings infrastructure, Resident Advisor and Songkick included, return no artist page at all; the live presence online runs through Bandsintown, Apple Music's concert listings and the venues' own ticketing. For an artist with two releases and a first North American support run that is an ordinary place to be, but it means any account of the set written from the outside would be guesswork.

What the ticketing does say is that the rooms are filling. A show with fifteen tickets left and a secondary market running at roughly twice the entry price is a full room by any practical measure, and a support act plays to that room from the first note rather than to a half-empty floor.

What the record does not yet say

Four things would change the picture, and all of them are checkable. The first is a label. Neither Warmth nor Chrysalis / Unfold shows an imprint in the open listings, which usually means self-release or a small independent that has not fed its metadata to the aggregators; either answer says something about how the next record gets made.

The second is the instrument list. "Acoustic instrumentalist" and "live-set act" are specific claims, and the only place to verify them is a stage. Whether that means a guitar over hardware or something larger is undocumented in the public record.

The third is the recorded pace. Two releases two years apart, the more recent one a two-track single, is not yet a rhythm. An album, or a run of singles through 2027, would settle whether the composition-led framing is a method or just a description.

The fourth is press. One long interview would answer the San Francisco question, the Granada question and the deep house question at once. Until that exists, the profile of Ben Po amounts to an EP, a double A-side, four November dates and a four-line self-description — and the four dates are the only part of it that can be watched happening.