feature photo: Robert Lewis
Guitarist/sound-texturalist David Torn and saxophonist Tim Berne joined forces to offer a sonic mind-bender fabricated out of thin air. Released just in time to make your last minute 2025 Christmas shopping decisions much easier, door journals a live, impromptu jam from the two at an unknown place and time.
An outpouring of spontaneous high art from the fertile minds of Berne and Torn (and the guitar-driven electronic manipulative genius of Torn), door is a thirty-one minute single-track album, comprising of the performance “door is open.”
If you were to guess that this sounds like Sun of Goldfinger without Ches Smith’s percussion, you may be more or less on the mark. But a rhythmless Sun of Goldfinger is no less interesting or stimulating. The Torn/Berne association goes back much further, however, starting with Torn’s mastering of Berne/Bloodcount’s Unwound in 1996 and blossoming into Torn’s Prezens in 2007, still three years before Sun of Goldfinger got started.
The long-running familiarity between the two is the spoon the stirs the blend of rich talents together into soup. The trippiest moment occurs about seven-and-half-minutes in when Berne’s sax simulates a squall of five angry Tim Bernes. Following that is an extensive period of eerie brooding, incorporating the lack of sound as an additional instrument and exposing a window allowing one to peer into the cabalistic foundation of this purely instinctive musicmaking.
Whenever the proceedings threatens to evaporate, Berne timely steps in and injects the human passion that impeccably counters Torn’s, menacing, machinal, electronically-enhanced guitar.
The performance was recorded in mono. Even while Torn later mixed and mastered it into stereo, the mono origins gives the music an inscrutable, muddy quality that blurs the separation between Torn and Berne … perfect for the vibe they seem to be aiming for.
door is obtainable now and you can obtain it on Bandcamp.
*** David Torn’s CD’s and vinyl on Amazon ***
*** Tim Berne CD’s and vinyl on Amazon ***
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