Interview: Nat Bergrin (Kraanerg)
The full interview
Today on Stereogum, we ran a blurb for Heart of a Cherry Pit Sun, one of my favorite releases of the year. The three-song album is a welcome burst of emotion, a gamma ray from the spirit, that is also a brainy, detailed work recommended to any sound enthusiast. This melding of heart and avant-garde art is irresistible to me, one of those things that makes my mind expand in ways that I crave.
Featuring contributions from Laktating Yak's Angel Garcia (drums, vocals), Kostnatění's D. L. (guitars), El Mantis's Danny Kamins (saxophone), and Daniel Cho (violin), along with one of the most texturally rich mixes and masters of Markov Soroka's extended oeuvre, you know from the liner notes alone that Heart of a Cherry Pit Sun will push boundaries, redistricting the borders of a listener's imagination. But the soul of this album belongs to its composer, Nat Bergrin, who plays piano, synths, and additional guitars on the album. It's no surprise to learn the album is something of a diaristic work, tracking Bergrin's life over the last four years. It's hard to explain, but you can sense this unmistakable human quality beating within Heart of a Cherry Pit Sun. I connected with the album in the same way I'd connect with someone sitting across a table from me: a more profound, empathetic understanding of how the pieces fit together to give Heart of a Cherry Pit Sun its personality.
The quotes I used in the Stereogum blurb come from an extended interview with Bergrin where they went deep on the album's genesis along with a preview of a future column on how metal, and extreme music in general, intersects with prog, zeuhl, and RIO. It's a great read, and you can read it in full below.
How did Kraanerg start, and how did things evolve?
I grew up as a classically trained pianist even as a kid, and I've been writing my own scores since middle school. There's something about the art of writing notes on paper that really appeals to me, even if they never leave the page as audio. I love how fine-grained it is, manipulating the individual proportions of notes and harmonies. I still sometimes write solo piano miniatures like diary entries, even if the ideas will never have anything to do with Kraanerg.
I honestly had no idea what I wanted Kraanerg to be when I started the project. I think I just realized it was time to see how much I could use actual production to bring the scores to life beyond college practice room pianos. That was how the Untitled EP started, but then things took a massive turn with Harbinger, which was pivotal to getting me to think about my vision more deeply. I remember there was this moment of convergence where I was trying hard to engage more properly with atonal theory, and right around then, I heard about Jute Gyte, and I was like, Hey, maybe I could do that! All of Harbinger was first independently written as a series of slow-paced, ethereal solo piano works that were, at least in theory, meant to draw heavily on Tristan Murail's "Territoires de l'Oubli" filtered through my own amateur lens. I played a bunch of passages at around 3x the original speed, stuck on some distorted effects, added drum machine blast beats, and there you go. I think it's terrible in retrospect, haha.
I don't think I've ever considered Kraanerg to be a metal project in any real sense; it's more of a conduit for channeling raw compositional ideas into something meatier using heavier rock orchestration. At the very least, it's PROG with metal influence, not METAL with prog influence. Particularly since I started work on Heart of a Cherry Pit Sun, I've spent a lot of time trying to drastically broaden the sources of influence that I draw from and really hoping to counteract any feeling that I'm just a collage of Score Idea X with Production Idea Y, a problem which I think honestly prevents me from enjoying a lot of other modern avant-metal or prog acts. I will say that, for quite a while, zeuhl/RIO and post-impressionist Western classical music have been my main true loves, and that Cherry Pit definitely feels like my most unabashed love letter to those traditions, but I also don't think I've ever started a project thinking "oh, I want this to be genre X."
How did the full band come together on Heart of a Cherry Pit Sun? (There are a lot of familiar faces to readers, including a Laktating Yak sighting that made me super happy.)
Most of the people involved in Cherry Pit are people who have a social connection to me. Kraanerg is a very personal project, and so I'm still a bit apprehensive about working with people who I don't consider friends at least in some capacity, and I think the desire to work with people who I actually trusted and respected is a big part of why it took almost four years to write and record. I'm particularly thankful for DL's support, who's been a dear friend since before even my very first release came out.
I will also say that the improvised music scene in Houston has also been a major inspiration to me for years. It's always been a super welcoming community from my experience, and I've also found it really valuable to free up my mind through performing group free improv sets. It's the polar opposite mindset to the very planned, individualistic approach I habitually take as a score composer, and so not only is it just fun, but it's also really good for combating writer's block. I know the Laktating Yak crowd, in particular, through that scene.
Based on the score walkthrough for "The Deluge (Pipes Burst From Joy Alone)," I assume most of the album was composed before recording. What was the composition process like?
All Kraanerg material thus far has been written on score to a solid 90 percent level of detail before recording a single bar. This is true for all upcoming material that I've started on as well. I've thought about releasing these scores alongside the albums as they come in the future, but TBA on that since not all of my notes are necessarily legible to anyone else.
This has also been something of a practical necessity, as having a score to fall back on has allowed me to keep up recording even as circumstances around my life change drastically. I've relocated seven times since 2018 — I say the project is Houston-based since that's where a lot of other members live and where I stayed the longest, but things have certainly been more convoluted than that. Having a preordained plan for each track has allowed me to pick up the pieces after each relocation and not lose my train of thought or to continue workflow with the other members, even though we've rarely ever been in the same room.
In the liner notes, you write, "A diary of my life over the past four years in the form of prog madness." Without necessarily going into specifics, how did these life chronicles shape the music?
I think I was very analytical in my approach to the pre-Cherry Pit releases. I already mentioned the Harbinger process, then Veins took that framework and tried to strategically inject it with a sort of art-school zaniness. The weird ass vocals, in particular, I very much hoped would channel a sort of metal-inflected answer to Demetrio Stratos, and I wanted to pull more from turn-of-the-century futurist piano as well to give it this general dada vibe. I don't think this succeeded at all, and I deliberately wanted to rebuild my approach from scratch on Cherry Pit, which is now the only thing I've released that I actually enjoy.
Cherry Pit didn't have any sort of weird "mission statement," the issue that's strangled most of my previous work, and I think it's much better for it. Most of the ideas came directly from stitching together "diary scores," ideas knocked out in one sitting to process something new and interesting I recently listened to or an emotion I was trying to work through. Particularly over a four-year timespan, it became an intensely personal way of documenting my life. I can point to specific moments on the album and remember what I was feeling on the day of composition.
As such, the progression of Cherry Pit also follows several extremely important changes in my life, albeit not in a way that might be accessible to anyone but myself. It's certainly a travel diary, with bits of audio from six US states and four other countries. I also see it as inextricably linked to my process of coming to terms with my queer identity and gender fluidity in particular. In incorporating so many more influences, and being far more open about the genuine emotional content of my work, it also represents embracing the sides of myself that I had repressed heavily in the years prior. There's a lot of uncritical bitterness to my past work, and Cherry Pit has genuinely been extremely helpful in allowing me to process past baggage and reconstruct my art into something new, something dynamic and beautiful. I see that same transformation as happening with how I see my own self and presentation, in a way.
One of the most impressive elements of Heart of a Cherry Pit Sun is how well it communicates feelings and emotions despite being instrumental. For instance, I feel like I can hear you talking to me through the Univers Zero-esque lead melodies on "The Deluge." As I'm somewhat of a music illiterate, how are you able to pull something like that off, especially when it comes to uniting a large band into something that sounds so singular?
This is a tricky question for me to answer, honestly. I personally find that instrumental music has a lot more capacity to channel raw emotion than music with singing, at least on average. Harsh vocals, especially to me, feel antithetical to conveying anything too emotionally immediate, even for bands I really enjoy, which is why I had to ditch them. There's just something more pure about melodies delivered on a saxophone or violin compared to something diluted by lyrical content.
That being said, there are actually quite a few moments on the album, and on "The Deluge" in particular, where the instrumental melodies are heavily based on the vocal melodies of other albums I admire. There are absolutely direct quotations from Magma/Offering, Sun City Girls, several tropicália classics, etc., if you know where to look. The piano lines also have a few sources from fairly well-canonized composers, such as Rachmaninoff and Astor Piazzolla.
This is something of a teaser for that future column, but how did you get into prog, zeuhl, RIO, etc., and how do you feel those subgenres are shaping extreme music now?
Yes, I'd be super interested in this. I very much believe in being as transparent as possible about my work so I'm happy to contribute however I can!
I just kind of stumbled on Magma from a friend's offhand mention once, and they blew my mind. They've been my favorite band ever since. I honestly don't think a lot of other zeuhl or avant-prog truly compares either, even though I do still enjoy other acts, just because Magma's vision is so singular. It was through Magma that I eventually got huge into spiritual jazz, which was a whole phase for me, and then into free improvisation, which I've mentioned has been very inspiring and a solid social outlet as well. I can truly say that my life would be fundamentally different without zeuhl.
I find that the ecstatic atmosphere that Magma (also under the Offering name) strives for has been a major inspiration to me. I love that they channel such daring compositional experimentation to the ultimate aim of cosmic elation and not just to sound dissonant or aggressive like so many bands today. I tend to find the fact that being avant-garde is often synonymous with negative emotions in today's rock is incredibly limiting, and most of the metal bands I do enjoy are those that go beyond this.
I guess the fundamental lesson to be learned from zeuhl and RIO to me is that the best ideas are built from the ground up. The core RIO scene had bands that sought to push compositional limits from a very fundamental level; they weren't saying, "Let's fuse our prog sound with genre X." It was art for art's sake, in the best way. There's a band for virtually every combination of 80 percent metal and 20 percent X, but so few are critical about how they go about that fusion or to what emotional end. Half the time, it feels arbitrary; half the time, it just feels like they want the sound to be even more hellish, more dissonant, etc., which also seems lazy to me. People like Penderecki or Xenakis were never trying to create cheap scares through dissonance; it was a search for artistic beauty through the unfamiliar.
Yet, at the same time, metal is undeniably one of the best vanguards today for pushing the compositional envelope when done right. So I think looking for bands that just fuse metal and RIO/prog/jazz/whatever isn't going to be a fruitful search, but looking for bands that apply the ethos of opposition to extreme music is a gold mine.
I guess to illustrate what I'm talking about, I'm absolutely obsessed with Wormlust's The Feral Wisdom because, sure, it's technically metal but I basically see it as the best prog album this side of 2010. It's so immediately compositionally striking and uses that complexity to the aim of twisted, psychedelic, but very much genuine beauty. It takes all of the apocalyptic energy of a lot of black metal and turns it into an apotheosis to a degree I'm not sure I've heard anyone else match. It's a product of years of honed craft, and the result is spectacular. Stabscotch's Prison Jar is another one that I'd name as a true achievement for its extremely thorough, meticulous exploration of virtually every avenue for sounding as manic as possible while also preserving a fantastic ear for memorable hooks and surprisingly nuanced emotional impact.
Got a question? Email us! plagueragespod at gmail
Check out Wolf's other garbage: https://linktr.ee/wrambatz
Our logo and branding are by Mike Teal. Find Mike at www.storylightmarketing.com and www.miketealdesign.com
Like what we’re doing? Drop us a donation on Ko-fi