SOUNDTRACK: MATT BERRY-Music for Insomniacs (2014).
Matt Berry is a renaissance man and I love everything he does. Whether it’s acting in over the top comedies or making over the top prog rock, Berry is my guy. He has several albums out already. This one was his fifth. Evidently he created this album in the middle of the night while unable to sleep.
The back cover image is of him sitting amid a Rick Wakeman-like array of keyboards. And if you’re into gear, he lists everything that he plays on this album:
Arp Odyssey Synthesiser, Korg MS-20 Synthesiser, Korg MS-20008 Synthesiser & Vocoder, Korg Sigma Synthesiser, Korg Polyphonic Ensemble, Korg SV1 Electric Piano, Minimoog Synthesiser, Mellotron-Pro, Solina String Ensemble, Roland Jupiter 4m Synthesiser, Roland Pro Mars Synthesiser, Roland juno 6 Synthesiser, Roland Gaia Synthesiser, Roland Jupiter 80 Synthesiser, Yamaha CS-15 Synthesiser, Yamaha CS-60 Synthesiser, Hammond XKB Organ, Korg & Roland rhythm boxes and found percussion.
Why would anyone need so many synthesisers? Well, to make an album like this.
It is two 23 minute “songs.” They are meandering, trippy sounds mashed up with snippets of “songs.”
Part 1 opens with vocals and then an organ playing a familiar-ish classical organ melody but it’s only a nod to classical music because soon enough a bass comes in and turns the music into a very different sounding piece. I particularly love the way he phases and echoes the drums. Variations on this song/theme run for about five minutes with more and more interesting sounding effects, until it all fades out into waves of synths.
The swirling synths create an atmosphere for another five minutes when abruptly, you hear something being turned off (or on) and a shushing. More trippy synth washes follow and then at 13 minutes a new keyboard melody is added to the washes–a gentle tune that give the washes some momentum. It starts building until 16 minutes when it grows distinctly dark. Creepy echoing voices come out of the fog. And you can hear someone shouting okay okay. Then out of the quiet, a martial drumbeat grows louder and louder as a song starts to form. At 19 minutes, the melody from “October Sun” from his Kill the Wolf album starts playing. A processed voice sings the lyrics, but they are very hard to hear. I assume it is Cecilia Fage, as she is credited with voice/choir.
Part two is not radically different. It opens with a choir of voices. It morphs into gentle washes of synths like mid-period Pink Floyd, complete with space sounds–whooshing and zapping. Then comes what sounds like a horse walking by and some slightly dissonant keys before some hugely vocodered voice start singing a melody. It’s followed by pianos at seven and a half minutes which merge with the rest of the synth melody. There is much more going on in the background–voices, sounds, who knows what.
Things abruptly end with a big splash of water at 8:45 and remain underwater for a time before a new synth pattern emerges. Things become celestial with a choir around 13 minutes. After a big explosion at 14 minutes, spacey chords return followed by another explosion and a return underwater–squishy sounds, then a distant bay crying (my daughter just walked in and said this music is creepy). Other sounds swim in and out as angelic voices sing. This goes on until 17 minutes when things settle down into a more stately organ-fueled section. Things drift away almost to silence and then at 19, a pulsing synth bass starts things up again. He adds a jaunty synth melody to the bass and it’s suddenly a new wave song. This dancy part continues until the end of the song when things grind to a halt.
This is a peculiar record for sure. It’s not soothing for sleep, nor is it particularly upbeat for non-sleep. But it is an interesting look into Matt Berry’s headspace.
[READ: November 18, 2020] “Fata Morgana”
This is an excerpt from Koeppen’s novel Pigeons on the Grass which was translated by Michael Hofmann.
I’m not sure where in the story this comes from, but I feel like it jumps in right in the middle of a scene.
A black man, Washington Price, is walking through the streets of tenement houses (in Germany) with a bouquet of flowers: “he had marriage on his mind.”
He wasn’t particularly notable in this area, but the fact that he arrived in a blue limousine started a lot of people grumbling behind the tenement windows.
He was there to see Carla. Carla lived on the third floor with some other girls and their minder, Frau Welz. The other girls were there for the soldiers. As (maybe?) was Carla. They all knew he was there for Carla, but that didn’t stop them from trying to entice him into their room. (more…)
