This mini profile originally ran in August 2024 edition of Stereogum’s The Black Market.
In more ways than one, Nat Bergrin is Kraanerg’s Heart Of A Cherry Pit Sun. There’s the literal sense: Bergrin composed the three-song album and assembled the crack ensemble, which consists of ultra-talented players in prog, free improvisation, and the avant-garde side of metal. However, fittingly for a multifaceted creation, Bergrin’s relationship to this album runs much deeper than that.
“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,” Bergrin writes in an email. “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.”
What Bergrin has composed is daring in its complexity, a many-sided marvel that never fails to unveil something new. There are, of course, the sonic layers. Bergrin, who plays piano, synths, and additional guitars, is joined by Laktating Yak’s Angel Garcia (drums, vocals), Kostnatění’s D. L. (guitars), El Mantis’ Danny Kamins (saxophone), and Daniel Cho (violin), along with some extra “ambience” by Tchornobog’s Markov Soroka, who also mixed and mastered the album. These players construct not just a wall of sound but paint a vibrant, detailed mural upon that wall. Every section is packed with independent points of interest, aural brushstrokes with their own narrative arcs, that unifies as a greater whole. It might be trite to write, but in that respect, Heart Of A Cherry Pit Sun echoes life’s expected and unexpected contours in the grander sense and on a smaller, more personal level.
“It’s certainly a travel diary, with bits of audio from six US states and four other countries,” Bergrin writes regarding Heart Of A Cherry Pit Sun’s progression. “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.”
Those dynamic and beautiful moments make up some of Heart Of A Cherry Pit Sun’s other layers, such as the affecting emotional undercurrents that sweep listeners along, peeling back the buffers surrounding the self until it uncovers something more vulnerable and earnest. For an album that, beyond some wordless vocals woven into textures, is instrumental, it’s almost as if Heart Of A Cherry Pit Sun is constantly conversing with you. It’s engaging, not only because its experimental side excites the synapses, but because it calls out for a response.
“I personally find that instrumental music has a lot more capacity to channel raw emotion than music with singing, at least on average,” Bergrin answers when asked about how they communicate feelings and emotions through the music. “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 said, as Bergrin clarifies, the human voice is there if you listen for it. “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.”
Right, let’s talk about “The Deluge (Pipes Burst from Joy Alone).” Following the 22-minute opening track, “Here The Ground Is A Spandrel,” “The Deluge” bolsters the album’s ideas while paving paths toward new avenues. The opening, with Garcia’s pounding drumming anchoring the swirling storm clouds produced by the rest of the band, is one of the album’s heavier moments, although Bergrin stresses they weren’t aiming for metal. “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.”
The progness really shines through on “The Deluge.” When the tempest of tones starts to part, it echoes the “ecstatic atmosphere” of Magma, one of Bergrin’s influences. And Cho’s gorgeous violin at 3:53 might remind listeners of Rock in Opposition heavyweights such as Univers Zero. “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,” Bergrin explains when asked how they got into those subgenres and how they feel those subgenres are shaping extreme music now. “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.”
Heart Of A Cherry Pit Sun fits into that ‘best way’ tradition. Here’s this composition that reverberates on a human level because it’s so steadfastly singular. It’s one of those beautiful quirks of art: how one person’s journey — in this case, these diaristic scores — can be so moving that it allows others to find meaning in a life that isn’t theirs. That’s empathy, really. And so, Nat Bergrin is Heart Of A Cherry Pit Sun, but it’s so invitingly vast, so generous, so open, it can be you, too.