RAMBLE SONG – 2021

Ramble Song on Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / Deezer
Ramble Song Teaser 1 / Teaser 2

With Ramble Song, BERLIN propels music [a driving foundation in earlier work] and the cinematic into the foreground. A poetic ramble full of beauty but also disappointment unravels in a series of tableaux. Ramble Song meanders between melancholy and black humour, inspired by the figure of the drifter ­– the nomad who cultivates a form of indecisiveness and who lurks in each of us.

Onstage there is a theatrical installation. This organism in sleep mode, with something that resembles a continuously audible and visible respiration, is animated through live music and footage. The soundtrack is wide-ranging, featuring echoes of new-classical music but also energetic krautrock and a diversity of synth-driven soundscapes. The daily noise between our ears here gives way to a musical universe that gets crystallized in images – and vice versa.

Ramble Song features four musicians onstage: BERLIN’s in-house composer Peter Van Laerhoven, who has been creating BERLIN’s soundscape from the very beginning, Tim Coenen [Miet Warlop, Het nieuwstedelijk, The Go Find, Roadhouse Libra,..], Eric Thielemans [EARR, Chantal Acda, Tape Cuts Tape, Ben Sluijs Quartet, BERLIN's Jerusalem and Remember The Dragons,..] and Tine Hubrechts [o.a. The Bear That Wasn’t]. The performance will be accompanied by a physical [vinyl] and digital release of the music.

Ramble Song differs from earlier work in formal terms, but is vintage BERLIN in terms of inventive puzzling with (presentation) forms to achieve a powerful whole. The profound humanity that characterized previous, often documentary work is taken even further in this fictional work, averse to the anecdotic and to dominant storylines.

photo © Koen Broos

 

press quotes
★★★ ‘'Ramble Song' stands out in Berlin’s oeuvre: not a documentary performance, but a film concert that turns the gaze inward. […] as if this time, the makers were giving you the keys to document your inner world. This work, both mourning ritual and acte de présence, is to be felt rather than read. And that is courageous.’ – Gilles Michiels in De Standaard