Berlin Strings are a string quartet, but above all, they are a promise: That complexity does not have to sound hermetic. That danceability and introspection can fit into a single bow stroke. That music can be complicated, but not in an exclusionary way, but in a way that makes you want to understand it, one that opens up numerous avenues. And through all this, Berlin Strings are first and foremost: a promise that classical music can be more than the brilliant solo ventures of individual performers.

Lisa Marie Vogel, Johanna Wundling, Tabea Haarmann-Thiemann, and Luisa Babarro Fernández have spent enough time researching their own sound since meeting in the German Youth Orchestra and founding Berlin Strings 13 years ago. A sound that has always been imbued with both: the discipline of classical music, pure craftsmanship, the sublime rules of composition that allow communication to become wordless. But also experimentation, flirting with dissonance and arhythmicity, with cuts and loops, the electronically constructed foundation that on their first album "On A Dark Night" now becomes the supporting force of many string arrangements. An architecture that works because it always centers around violins, viola, and cello.

That was the challenge when Berlin Strings, in the midst of pandemic paralysis, set out in active search of collaborators for an album that is particularly bold because its creators gave up control over the compositions, which they would later record. "On A Dark Night" has become such an approachable album not least because it tells of the trust between artists from the most diverse fields, of sound activists, arrangers, and film musicians, who were guided solely by the working title "Play It On A Dark Night", a poem by the musician and lyricist Patti Smith, as well as an Edward Hopper painting. And the knowledge of this one silent agreement: the string quartet remains in focus.

An anchor that allows the strings of the quartet to revolve just as vividly around their own fixed point in the unstable realms of Shannon Seas' avant-garde aesthetic as they do surrounded by the beauty of repetition in Therese Strasser. The post-rock-like voice field recordings by Philipp Johann Thimm bring it just as much back to the bowed or plucked core of the album as they allow Ella Zwietnig's siren-like singing to expand for just a momentary snapshot. Through all this, "On A Dark Night" is no shadow album, it is hopeful in the most dazzling way, just as the forward-looking opening piece by Ralph Heidel and Dascha Dauenhauer's perpetually self-reconstructing "Play It On A Dark Night" predicts. And sometimes it is even funny enough to make you cry. For example, when the violins in Gunter Papperitz's "Night Ride Under Ground" break into a staccato sprint. And it is healing when Conrad Oleak's Electronica splashes down like life-giving drops on a dry basic arrangement, while you cut in and out somewhere like in a Coen brothers film – for example in Anneli Bentler's delicate sound design backdrop or in "Somnium" by Berlin Strings member Tabea Haarmann-Thiemann.

"On A Dark Night" was recorded as part of a grand reunion with all the collaborators at the Berlin Vox-Ton Studio. A challenge, according to Luisa Babarro Fernández, because unlike in pop, when recording string arrangements, you hear everything, every scratch, every stumble, every lapse in concentration. Very little can be edited, cut, or moved. On "On A Dark Night" no lapse in concentration is felt, no scratch is heard – or it is intentional. Perhaps because Wundling, Vogel, Haarmann-Thiemann, and Babarro Fernández have known their instruments since childhood, perhaps because they were completely sure of their skills, but perhaps also because Berlin Strings with this album have made a promise not only to their listeners, but also to themselves: Whoever stumbles here will be caught.

Credits
Text: Jennifer Beck
Image: Rebecca Kraemer

The debut album "On A Dark Night" by Berlin Strings will be released on July 14, 2023.