Aeron Bergman | The Tale of the Unhappy American
Tomlab | CD
"I dreamt of a train station during a thunder storm. The people around me were not hurrying to work as usual; they were calmly walking, silent except for their footsteps. I saw the roof leaking, water fell in huge drops onto the station's black and white marble floor..."
The tiniest observations and fragments of everyday life lie at the heart of Aeron Bergman's first full-length release for Koln-based Tomlab (he has a string of releases as one half of prolific duo Alejandra and Underwood/Aeron on Spain's eclectic Lucky Kitchen label/collaborative).
'The Tale...' - in Bergman's words: "a tale to be enjoyed by a fireside on a cold winter Sunday afternoon" - is a story of conflict, destruction and loss; a familiar narrative underscored by the most delicate and intricately woven of electronic structures.
Fragments of voices emerge, linger, then disappear, forever buried in the distance, lost except as signifiers to the ordinary beauty of day-to-day life itself; an ordinariness that is offset by the most extraordinary of compositions. Without question, this is some of the most emotionally-saturated music to have been released for quite some time. Each hesitant melody is intertwined with Bergman's poignant spoken interludes. Each interlude is a window onto some strange place existing as if only in memory.
There are undoubtedly tracks which leap from the mix, but to focus on individual tracks would, I think, miss the point. Better to sit back, relax and dedicate a Sunday afternoon - warm or wintry - to forty minutes of sheer bliss.
[CM]
