Weaving Sounds, Crossing Traditions
Tim Berne's Sunny Five, Chico Mello
Tim Berne’s Sunny Five Brings Heat to a Harrowing Sonic Landscape
Tim Berne loves playing music. He thrives when subsumed by the din he and his colleagues produce, a dense, infinitely mutable blanket of sound that’s intensely physical, but I mean he loves the sheer act of making music. When he’s at home in New York he’s regularly playing low stakes gigs which he uses to tinker with older projects as well as building new ones. For quite a few years he was busy with Sun of Goldfinger, a ferocious trio with guitarist David Torn and drummer Ches Smith that seriously advanced a new kind of dense, sculptural context for the saxophonist, with the guitarist’s inventive production opening up new possibilities. During one extended spell in 2022 Berne began experimenting with the line-up, calling it the Sunny (plus whatever number of musicians are involved), alluding to the fluidity of this sonic concept with a variety of close collaborators spanning decades. Berne’s Bandcamp page for Screwgun includes Mystic, a live recording by the Sunny Four, with the core trio enhanced by the phenomenal multi-instrumentalist and singer Aurora Nealand. The recording is relatively lo-fi, but still captures the multi-layered mass endlessly churned and dragged around by Smith’s surging-lurching attack. It rolls on ecstatically for 51 minutes—I swear a lick from Ornette’s “Jump Street” comes up and it’s obliquely passed around for a hot second—but by it’s conclusion time has become a blur. The whole thing smokes, and it feels like Berne and his associates can conjure this kind of trance at will.
Last month Intakt released Candid, a new studio recording by the Sunny Five, and if it had only extended Berne’s streak of searing contrapuntal throwdowns that would be notable enough. Honestly, I thought the collision of Berne, Smith, and Torn with fellow electric guitarist Marc Ducret and bassist Devin Hoff—sticking exclusively to electric—could possibly be too much of a good thing, with the leader’s propensity for meticulously detailed, densely clustered intersecting lines threatening to crater the whole enterprise. There’s no doubt much of the success belongs to Torn’s production, both live and after the fact, as he achieves an almost hyperreal three dimensionality with the strata of sound. I can’t say how much of his addition and subtraction occurred live or in post-production, but it doesn’t matter much. There’s no question these five musicians are telepathically locked in, so if Torn’s shorn away certain sounds here and there, leaving only Berne’s striated alto riffs to tangle with smothered, lean breaks pounded out by Smith, who am I to question how things got there? But Torn isn’t cutting shit out at the mixing desk; the musicians know how to sculpt in real-time just fine, dropping out, pushing, and caressing, depending on the need. He just enhances everything.
I read a review that called this music dystopian, and that term makes plenty of sense considering that the performance trudges and plods through a relentless dirge, but that word suggests it’s all lifeless and dour, qualities that don’t account for the electric vitality at the core of the music, as if they players were feverishly chiseling sound from unwieldy slabs. If the vibe was light and optimistic, well, it wouldn’t be Tim Berne. But this shit has simultaneously tripped-me out and woken me up. The album’s epic 35-minute closer “Floored” feels deliciously blown-out at times, Hoff’s grimy rumble almost falling apart or Smith’s punishing snare bombs pushing the meter into the red. At one particularly thrilling section Berne rides up front, wringing endless variations in phrasing and attack, while in the distance Hoff and Smith simmer and the guitarists jostle between white noise and blunt objects. The group sounds like a massive factory, with every crank and gear groaning and croaking at full blast—except when one part or another dips out. The album actually opens somewhat calmly with “Piper,” which you can hear below. We can hear the various strings vibrate when Ducret strums a chord at the start.
It’s a good entrance to the album, laying out the general parameters with less volume and intensity from what follows, as Berne indicates how he will extract every possibility from each new phrase while being buffeted by the visceral onslaught dancing around him. The initial “serenity” doesn’t last. Structurally it feels like the action all radiates from the leader’s scythe-like edge, cutting through the sonic din like a lighthouse, but over time we hear everyone sort of taking a similar path in wildly different ways. While each player is pursuing a different direction, they’re always cognizant of what’s happening around them, embracing it or jamming a stick in the spokes. The piece takes a chill three minute descent, slowing and quieting, only to conclude with a rude stab of sudden noise from Torn. It’s a fucking journey. A good chunk of “Scratch” finds Berne immediately in the zone, taking a couple of related phrases and just digging in like he’s trying to reach the center of the planet, building ferocity as he cycles through every permutation, pushed by expertly controlled swells of metallic noise—as in the substance, not the genre. Ducret and Torn mesh like blood brothers even though this is the first recording to feature them together; it’s like they’ve melded via some long-term Berne osmosis.
Chico Mello’s Bossa-Experimental Pile Ups
The first time I ever heard Brazilian composer and singer Chico Mello was through his collaboration with veteran Berlin experimentalist Nicholas Bussman, in their duo Telebossa. I knew Bussman through his membership in Kapital Band 1 with drummer Martin Brandlmayr, so I checked out the group’s eponymous 2011 debut on Staubgold. But my silly prejudices—why would I listen to a Brazilian collaborating with a German musician, when I could listen to purely Brazilian productions?—prevented me from giving it a fair shake. Of course, that was stupid. Ben Ratliff wrote about the recording with typical eloquence at the time, but I think I had already moved on, foolishly. In that short piece Ratliff explains Mello’s unusual background, a singer and guitarist rooted in bossa nova but curious about contemporary classical tradition. In fact, Mello’s first recording from 1984—released by Polydor in Brazil and reissued in 2010 on the German label M=Minimal—reflected those interests, colliding traditional Brazilian forms with musique concrete and new music. He moved to Germany in 1987 to study with Dieter Schnebel and Witold Szalonek, and he’s remained in Berlin ever since. He continued to collide disparate sensibilities without the slightest bit of hesitancy, moving fluidly amid the city’s experimental scene, whether working in Arnold Dreyblatt’s groups or getting involved early on with the Wandelweiser Collective.
A couple of years ago I caught an amazing solo performance as part of a double bill with Swedish pianist Lisa Ullén presented by Labor Sonar. Mello played a single piece, moving between three different chairs in the space, extending and interrupting a bossa-tinged song, accompanied by his own acoustic guitar, during a set that was funny and beautiful in equal measure. It was clear that Mello had developed and finessed an aesthetic that was all his own, and such nonchalant collisions have been at the heart of his work for decades. In 1996 he collaborated with fellow guitarist and Brazilian expat Silvia Ocougne on an album titled Musica Brasileira De(s)composta—the second title ever issued by Edition Wandelweiser—that’s marked by a series of post-Cagean experiments complemented with accounts of classic tunes by the likes of Pixinguinha, Chico Buarque, and Baden Powell. The pair erased any divide with the music they grew up with and the music they were pulled to Europe by. The collisions feel simultaneously genuine and absurd, as you can vividly hear on “John Cage na Praia N. 4,” below, one of a series of compositions that focus on such sonic conflicts.
I’ve since revisited that first Telebossa record as well as its slightly less Brazilian-steeped follow up Garagem Aurora from 2016. They’re both great. Mello’s beautiful falsetto reminds me a bit of Caetano Veloso at his most tender, something you can pick up the stunning closing piece “Amoroso,” below. Mello doesn’t perform that often these days, but he’s taking up residence at Sowieso on Friday and Saturday, February 16 and 17, with a new ensemble and project called Song Piles. Honestly, I failed to rectify my unfamiliarity with Mello’s music after that memorable performance, and I’ve only done begun to do so over the last couple of days, but now I can’t wait to hear this new music, which treats older material with new chamber arrangements realized by Mello on guitar, piano, and voice along with violist Yodfadt Miron, cellist Sophie Notte, cello and double bassist Thiago Duarte. Those John Cage at the beach pieces will be featured this weekend: according to the singer’s blurb, “Song Piles is a project for voice/guitar/piano and low string trio in which numerous fragments of Brazilian Música Popular are superimposed and recomposed. Some of Mello’s previous works (such as ‘John Cage at the Beach N° 0’) also undergo this process and are reconcepted/resounded for the string trio.”
Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week
February 13: Contagious (Sabine Ercklentz, trumpet, electronics, Andrea Neumann, inside piano, mixer, Mieko Suzuki, electronics, turntable) with Liz Kosack, synthesizer, 8:30 PM, Morphine Raum, Köpenicker Straße 147, 10997 Berlin (Hinterhof 1. Etage)
February 13: Celine Voccia & Julie Sassoon, piano duo, 8 PM, studioboerne45, Börnestr. 45, 13086 Berlin
February 14: Aki Takase, piano, & Daniel Erdmann, saxophones, duo and quartet (with Robert Lucaciu, bass, and Dag Magnus Narvesen, drums), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin
February 15: Alina Ibragimova, violin, and Cedric Tiberghien, piano (Schumann, Webern, Pärt), 7:30 PM, Pierre Boulez Saal, Französische Straße 33d, 10117 Berlin
February 16: Chico Mello’s Song Piles (Chico Mello, voice, guitar, piano, Yodfadt Miron, viola, Sophie Notte, cello & Thiago Duarte, double bass), 8: 30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
February 17: Chico Mello’s Song Piles (Chico Mello, voice, guitar, piano, Yodfadt Miron, viola, Sophie Notte, cello & Thiago Duarte, double bass), 8: 30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
February 18: Tanja Feichtmair, alto saxophone, Roger Turner, drums, and Sophie Agnel, piano, 3:30 PM, Industriesalon Schöneweide, Reinbeckstraße 10, 12459 Berlin
February 18: Mariana Carvalho; Jérôme Noetinger & dieb13, 9 PM, Ausland, Lychener Str. 60, 10437 Berlin