Transient Thoughts 017 - Bersarian Quartett - Bersarian Quartett

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Bersarian Quartett’s self-titled debut is a clinic in melancholy music.  It channels hopelessness, futility, and fatalism in a way that few albums have before its release and few have matched since.  The album refuses to give the listener a moment’s peace, a fleeting glimpse of happiness or any mortem of joy.  

That’s not to say that the album is simply soul-crushing, the album has life and with it direction.  However, what the album does with that life is bring with it an acceptance that things will never be better than the miserable existence that is laid before the listener.  

Through the first notes of the opening track Oktober the listener is greeted with slow and drawn out strings that accompany the dark ambient backing.  The music paints strong imagery - painting views of faceless workers trudging endlessly through the rain.  All color has been washed away from their countenance and the environment around them.  They march endlessly into oblivion as they have no other choice.  

The music remains largely at a middling pace the entire album, and as such it adds to the feeling of futility.  Nothing changes, no matter how much one fights against it.  The music is delivered through a mix of electronic soundscapes and classical instrumentation - be that a piano, violins, a clarinet, or various percussion.

It is not until the final track that the pace of the album is broken.  It adds a sense of urgency to the music that would otherwise be absent, and makes for an excellent closing track.  It bookends a journey that has taken us, the listeners, into valleys of hopelessness  Yet despite all the suffering and turmoil the world continues to spin and nothing can be done to change fate.  

I am a self admitted fan of music that combines drastically different styles of music and combines them.  When done correctly it makes the music become greater than the sum of its parts.  Bersarian Quartett has done exactly that with their self-titled debut.  The artist has woven a beautiful tapestry of melancholy in audio form, and in doing so invites us to take part in its beautiful sadness.

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