Hotel Pools

Hotel Pools is the recording project of Portland, Oregon musician Ben Braun, who has spent close to a decade building a catalog of sun-bleached synth music soaked in Pacific Northwest rain and reverb. His sound sits between chillwave and synthwave, built on vintage analog gear - Prophet-6, Moog Subharmonicon, UDO Super 6 - and grounded by deep, patient rhythms, a trait he traces back to his father Michael Braun's years drumming for Hall & Oates. Since his 2018 debut Fall, Braun has released eight full-length records, including Constant, which spent two weeks on Billboard's Dance/Electronic Album Sales chart, and a collaborative album with French producer A.L.I.S.O.N. His most recent record, Nature, swapped the project's usual beachy sprawl for the forests of the Pacific Northwest, written in the months after the death of his younger brother Franklin. Braun works from instinct rather than plan, building each track around whatever gives him goosebumps and moving on once it's said what it needed to say.