Bitter Moon & After 05:08

THE BERLINER KINDER RECORDINGS

 Late December.

The sky over Berlin, greyer than its usual grey.  

What with the long trip and the latest epiphanies, the overall sense of fevered anticipation that we’d been feeling over the past few weeks slowly began to dissolve into solemn silence. 

“We feel affinities not only with the past, but also with the futures that didn’t materialize, and with the other variations of the present that we suspect run parallel to the one we have agreed to live in”, says Brian Eno in the notes to his album On Land. Nobody seemed to object to the realization that we were going to be doing our Berlin recordings without possibly ever leaving the apartment.

And so, in the next couple of days, during which we found ourselves walking along the thin line that oscillates between melodies and textures, we started to accept disconnection and displacement as part of the ambiance and the landscape. Courtesy the discovery of a tape recorder, equipped with a cassette whose four tracks played back a cacophony of completely unrelated recordings, we began taking interest in how sounds could be made to live separate lives, converging at times but without necessarily having to be synced and bound together in a traditionally musical way.

Second takes discarded in favour of first takes, a filter set to cut everything above 6khz, and things suddenly began to reflect the state we were in.

Bitter Moon & After 5:08, Spring 2022