Blink (Let Me Out Records)
Brigitte Beraha
Released May 20, 2022
Jazzwise Editor’s Choice
Jazz FM Awards 2022 Vocalist of the Year
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mecmczJAYoKSxNDD_0aZWhrBNU9j-4Q_o
Spotify:
About:
Brigitte Beraha is one of the most creative vocalists and composers currently working on the UK jazz scene. Beraha’s intention with Blink was not merely to put on a pyrotechnic display of her outstanding free range. Rather, she and her quartet of applauded creative musicians, Lucid Dreamers, sought to wreak a music based on “communication, interaction, and honesty with the surroundings, through playfulness, chaos or silence”. Partly composed and partly the result of improv sessions, the beautiful Blink transcends jazz, and melds with electronics in a way that is reminiscent not just of Basil Kirchin and Steve Lacy’s late electronic fusion work, but also of Talk Talk and the solo work of Robert Wyatt, in its oceanic ambience, its plaintiveness, and its periodic gusts of squally wildness, courtesy of tenor player George Crowley and drummer Tim Giles in particular.These are counterbalanced, however, by the discreet interplay of piano and synthesizers from Alcyona Mick and Beraha herself.
“Opening” puts out to water with a warm, yet desolate blast of tenor, with pianos clanging like buoys, floating across abstract sheets of electronics and wordless sighs. But these seafaring metaphors are
confounded as the various elements of Lucid Dreamers build and entwine.The title track is mellower, with fragments of melody, a velvet, jazzy lushness, even, that is then disrupted by skyscraping, wailing tenor and a tangle of confusion as Beraha starkly reflects that the more one seeks the meaning of life “the more incomprehensible it becomes”.
“Lullaby”, a meditation on communication between relatives and the nature of time, is lucid indeed, defiant in its determination to cling to life. “Doors”, which opens as if about to embark on a stand-up routine, epitomises the “playfulness” of which Beraha speaks, and radically so, with the song’s subject matter considered from every which angle, amid frantic, whack-a-mole volleys of percussion and joyful Dadaist phonetics from Beraha.
It’s on “Modulo 7” that all of the diverse, paradoxical strengths of Blink feature – over the simple, treated sound of human respiration, waves of jazz lap slowly in and out, as Beraha’s wordless phrases grow more detailed and eloquent, as tenor and piano join in an increasingly animated conversation. Then, all is silent, except for distant gunfire, buzzing bass synth, arcing skylines and anxious volleys of percussion, charcoal atmospheres, and whispered snatches of vocal – faint reminders of Stockhausen’s Hymnen, before a defiant finale. “Too Far To Hear My Singing” is at once intimate and remote, while the closing “Remembering” explores and evokes the very patterns and landscape of memory and subconscious, concluding on an ominously military drum roll. Blink is a richly evocative album, yet so spare at times as to threaten to submerge into a blissful, natural silence, intense yet light as air, far reaching in its experimentalism, yet closely attuned to the workings of the human heart.
Track Listing:
1. Opening 02:54
2. Blink 07:26
3. Lullaby 03:54
4. Wait for Me 02:45
5. Doors 06:37
6. Modulo 7 13:15
7. Too Far to Hear My Singing 07:00
8. Remembering 03:51
Music & lyrics by Brigitte Beraha
Personnel:
Brigitte Beraha: vocals, electronics, toys
George Crowley: tenos saxophone, clarinet, electronics
Alcyona Mick: piano, synthesizers, noises in piano
Tim Giles: drums, percussion, electronics
Recorded June 11th, 2021, at Livingston Studios, London
Engineered by Simon Todkill and Tris Ellis
Co-produced and Mixed by Alex Bonney
Mastered by Peter Beckmann
Artwork by Jacques Nazaire
Design by Calum Hadden
Produced by Brigitte Beraha
Review:
It’s curious how Beraha gets labelled as ‘experimental’. Isn’t any artist worth their salt, who tests boundaries and explores the new ‘experimental’? Is the word meant to give her some exclusive cache? Which would be odd because the music, especially with her band the Lucid Dreamers, as here, is about connection and communication, rather than being intellectual or ‘difficult’. Come to that I don’t get the ‘wordless vocal’ label: no one talks of a ‘wordless’ sax. Beraha’s voice is her instrument, her pipes more complex, more sensitised than any mechanical instrument; words are a bonus, and let’s face it, often get in the way of how music can mainline straight to the heart. Best of all Beraha is play-ful: full of fun, and in her band mates, her play pals, she has players who are happy to surrender to play-full approaches to serious living.
Crowley’s bluff melodicism is off set by Mick’s pared down chords while Giles plays all around the beat like a hound snuffling out the best of rhythmic truffles. Beraha herself is restrained and suggestive, at times darkly questioning as on the heartfelt ‘Lullaby’, at others mischievous and teasing as on ‘Doors’. The electronics are never intrusive, nor simply decorative but complement the soft gifting of breath that Beraha’s music shares with us. Epic tide turning pieces like ‘Modulo 7’ contrast to the yearning beauties of ‘Too Far to Hear My Singing’. Experiments all, experiences more so.
Andy Robson (Jazzwise)
