Ears of Experience
Rashad Becker, the Ex, Angharad Davies & Burkhard Beins
This week’s newsletter arrives a day late and shorter than usual. I’ve been out of town to review festivals in Brussels and Stockholm over the last two extended weekends—to say nothing of work deadlines that actually pay the bills—putting me well behind schedule, so I apologize for the inconsistency, but life keeps speeding by like it or not. I should be back in the groove next week.
Rashad Becker Renews My Faith
Last month Berlin electronic musician Rashad Becker released The Incident on his new label Clunk Records, his first full-length album since 2016. I can’t lie; I don’t spend much time listening to electronic music these days, but a perfunctory listen gradually pulled me into his latest opus, a double album that shapes sound like clay. To my ears he plays with squishy, rubbery sounds in a way that’s akin to the manner Autechre manipulates, dissects, and reimagines beats. At a moment when my disinterest with most electronic material has peaked, Becker’s new record has forced me to be less rigid with such dismissals, and while I can’t help but prefer a more tactile process, I have to admit that activity here delivers something analogous to my yearning for music that undergoes a constant metamorphosis.
This doesn’t really work as background music, as it demands close attention to give up its riches. Globular tones, fractalized rhythmic structures, and creeping timbral shifts all occur within an elaborate, breathless ballet. Layered patterns that seem utterly disconnected coalesce and collide in ways that reveal sudden correlations. What appear as disparate streams become unified architectures, as grooves melt down into coloristic puddles, juddering swishes harden into stuttering rhythmic patterns, and hauntingly elusive drifts break apart into 3-D models. The music possesses a serious heft, a sonic lava lamp that goes well beyond billowing shapes into sharp edges, boxy formations, and insistent pulsations. Sometimes I swear I hear conventional instruments like a rheumy bass clarinet, buzzy bass harmonica, and chimes, among others—it’s great when music plays tricks on you—but I’m pretty positive it’s all synthetic. Below you can check out one of the most expansive entries on the album, the closing track “what really happened,” which takes plenty of time tracing out its circuitous path. Becker doesn’t perform very often here in Berlin, but on Friday, May 16 he’s part of a new two-day project at Morphine Raum called Sanatorium Merkurial—a collaborative endeavor between Gerard Lebik’s Sanatorium of Sound and Merkurial, which is a publishing collective with absolutely zero online presence that I could detect. Robert Piotrowicz plays second.
Against the Odds, the Ex Renews Its Fight
Speaking of lengthy gaps between releases, the venerable Dutch post-punk combo the Ex recently dropped If Your Mirror Breaks (Ex), its first album in seven years, and on Thursday, May 15 they roll into town for a show at Neue Zukunft in support of it. The music occupies a familiar, almost comforting space, with a variegated weave of guitars atop the instantly recognizable drumming of Katherina Bornefeld, who continues to mine new variations within her primitive march cadence. The group’s three guitarists further refine an alignment that spans the autodidact sound-oriented attack of Terrie Hessels and the conventional. melody-driven playing of vocalist Arnold de Boer, with Andy Moor deftly straddling that divide. Unsurprisingly, the songs navigate a world in crisis, advocating a steely progressivism that acknowledges how fucked we are without giving in to a pessimism that seems harder and harder to elide. The way that the band has carried on without surrender is a radical act, and even if the music no longer feels revolutionary, the band has maintained its fire while digging deeper within a given soundworld, where interplay has supplanted sheer fury as a sonic focal point.
The combo rides a Bo Diddley stutter on the opening track “Beat Beat Drums,” an adaptation of the Walt Whitman poem, setting a tone for the album with its mix of realism and militant defiance, fighting on while maintaining a humanist ideal rather than nihilism. Several songs meditate on climate-related disasters that both surround and further threaten us, whether the opening line of “Monday Song” where de Boer laments, “There should be no trees in the open sea,” or in the similarly themed “In the Rain” where he notices his old home “floating together with ten multicoloured bathtub ducks.” As usual there is a riveting, comparatively tender tune sung by Bornefeld; “Wheel” deftly reflects a sense of disorientation many of us feel in a world that seems to be passing us by, where change doesn’t appear an organic process as much as a deliberate act of destabilization. Still, the drummer homes in on an essential, if inadequate response, and after noting that, “there is no escape,” she sings, “Your destiny lies in your own loving hands / and the wheel of life spins. Always.” Below you can check out the deliciously minimal “The Apartment Block,” a sparse, six-line exegesis on innate human greed where even the most modest ambitions fester in bigger, more self-serving ones.
Burkhard Beins and Angharad Davies Celebrate a Sublime Act of Sound Sculpture
At COPYRIGHTberlin on Sunday, May 18 Berlin percussionist Burkhard Beins and London-based Welsh violinist Angharad Davies will perform together in celebration of their sublime duo album Meshes of the Evening, which has just been released by NI VU NI CONNU. Take what I write here with a grain of salt, as I’m most certainly a biased, compromised observer; I wrote the album’s liner note essay and earlier this year I brought Davies to Chicago to perform as part of the Frequency Festival. But I wouldn’t have taken such actions if my respect and ardor for the music wasn’t real and deep. Both improvisers are uniquely attuned to infinite gradations of sound, frequently occupying the most restricted sonic terrain and uncovering a veritable universe of possibilities, which is certainly the case with this stunning recording made in Berlin back in June of 2022, when they last performed as a duo at Ausland.
The album opens with a characteristic Beins tactic; a sharp, sudden scrape of a cymbal that startles the listener. He briefly interrogates that sound world before the entry of Davies. Giving play by play on their performances, though, misses the point. What the pair achieve is a sublime melding of sensibilities, a spot-on connection revealed through a shared conjuring of color and texture, as the smallest of gestures unfold in shifting permutations, detours, and collisions where overlapping tones distort and abrade what might occur in solitude. I suppose this is a minimalist style of improvised music, but on the other hand it’s not as if little is happening. In reality, the action under the metaphoric hood reveals an entirely new world, as if a wide angle shot an ant colony explodes with frenetic motion when the lens zooms in. Last fall Beins and Davies gave a remarkable performance with harpist Rhodri Davies, the violinist’s brother, but after living with this recording for more than a year I can’t wait to experience the duo in the flesh this weekend. The bill also features a duo performance by percussionist Michael Vorfeld and accordionist Juliana Heise. Below you can check out the first of the album’s two pieces, “Meshes 1.”
Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week
May 13: Aly Eissa, oud, plays “The Fruit Fly,” 8:30 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)
May 13: Aki Takase, piano, and Daniel Erdmann, saxophone, 9 PM, B-Flat, Dircksenstr. 40, 10178 Berlin
May 14: Tim Bernardes, 8 PM, Saal 1, Funkhaus, Nalepastraße 18, 12459 Berlin
May 14: Anna Kaluza, alto saxophone, Nikolas Neuser, trumpet, Christof Thewes, trombone, and Martial Frenzel, drums, 8 PM, Terzo Mondo, Grolmanstraße 28, 10623 Berlin
May 14: Sawt Out (Burkhard Beins, percussion, Mazen Kerbaj, trumpet, and Michael Vorfeld, percussion), 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
May 14: Andrea Centazzo, percussion, Harri Sjöström, soprano & sopranino saxophones, Antonio Borghini, double bass, and Kriton Beyer, daxophone, 8:30 PM, Petersburg Art Space, Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 101, 10553 Berlin, entrance in the courtyard, Aufgang II, 1 OG
May 14: Oversaez (Sandro Sáez, piano, Jonas Westergaard, double bass, and Nathan Ott, drums), 8:30 PM, Jazz Club A-Trane, Bleibtreustraße 1, 10625 Berlin
May 14: Ensemble ~su (Peter Ehwald, saxophone, Kim Bo-Sung, percussion, voice, Shin Hyo Jin, percussion, voice, and So Sol-I, voice, percussion), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin
May 15: Ahmed Essyad, electro-acoustic works; Gilles Aubry, modular synth, computer, 8 PM, Kulturraum Zwingli-Kirche, Rudolfstr. 14 10245 Berlin
May 15: The Ex; Ara Lil Yoon, 8 PM, Neue Zukunft, Alt-Stralau 68, 10245 Berlin
May 15: Aldana Duoraan & HMOT; Eldar Tagi, 8:30 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)
May 15: Marta Warelis, piano, Olie Brice, double bass, and Joe Hertenstein, drums, with guest Tobias Delius, tenor saxophone, clarinet, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
May 16: Okkyung Lee, cello, Emilio Gordoa, percussion, and Isabella Forcinti, modular synthesizer, 8: 30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
May 16: Rashad Becker; Robert Piotrowicz, 8:30 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)
May 17: Fidan Aghayeva-Edler, piano, Nina Guo, soprano, Mareike Hein, acting, recitation; 24-hour marathon of new compositions by women composers, 11 AM, St. Elisabeth-Kirche, Invalidenstr. 3, 10115, Berlin
May 17: Aki Takase, piano, Daniel Erdmann, saxophone, and Kazuhisa Uchihashi, guitar, daxophone, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
May 18: Juliane Heise, accordion, and Michael Vorfeld, percussion; Burkhard Beins, percussion, and Angharad Davies, violin, 6 PM, COPYRIGHTberlin, Schwedenstr. 16, 13357 Berlin
May 18: Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Tönu Kaljuste, conductor, perform Arvo Pärt, 8 PM, chamber music hall, Philharmonie Berlin, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße 1, 10785 Berlin