Ben Bertrand is a Belgian bass clarinetist-composer who enhances the sonic palette of his acoustic woodwind instrument with many electronic devices to create hypnotic, slow-motion pools of sound that dilate time and space. His sonic universe is a paradoxical fusion of traditional and ancestral music, European classical music, and contemporary electronic music.
Relic Radiation is Bertrand’s fifth album and his fourth solo album. It was composed during a residency in Slovakia in the water mill of the Slovakian National Gallery (SNG) in Pezinok, and was recorded in July 2024. The seven, layered and looped, contemplative, and atmospheric pieces suggest a disorienting feeling of the meeting of the emotive, mostly melancholic, and familiar with the distant and frozen, moving in and out of our perception. There is no predefined form or context here, just a different tuning of the ethereal sonic palette of the bass clarinet with single notes and spacious layers that sound like a subtle sonic exploration of endlessness, constantly flowing inward and outward, and personal and impersonal. These refined, minimalist pieces sometimes correspond with the solo dance pieces of John Surman or Jon Hassell’s Fourth World concepts.
Bertrand quotes from the sci-fi book The Puppies Of Terra (1978) by American writer and poet Thomas M. Disch (1940-2008), about a first visit of an alien to Earth in 2024 and his impression of the sunlight. «Organs that have evolved under particular conditions will naturally be most comfortable where those conditions obtain, and thus no substitute, however artful, can provide just those balances of colour and intensity, those alterations of night and day, summer and winter, hazy and clear, that our very cells will recognize, demand, and crave».
Listening to Bertrand’s music was imagined before as the feeling of sitting by the sea, watching a slow motion of our crazy lives sailing by. Relic Radiation may be a modest addition to the impressions of the visiting alien, a subdued lament on the deteriorating situation of our planet’s organs.
Eyal Hareuveni
Ben Bertrand (bass clarinet, electronics)
