Steve Beresford & Anne Marie Beretta
Dancing The Line
The debonaire ambient bops of Steve Beresford’s 1985 collab with fashion designer Anne Marie Beretta clearly endures on this welcome maiden reissue, newly remastered and ready to soundtrack dozens more late nights.
‘Dancing the Line’ frames prolific and pivotal improviser Beresford puckering his abundant tekkerz at the service of a charmingly finessed sound that stands far out from his prior run of work Derek Bailey’s Company. Flanked by David Toop (flute, bamboo, soprano sax), and Alan Hacker (clarinet, basset horn, soprano sax), Beresford handles Yamaha DX7, RX11 drum machine, keys and mic, often duetting with Kazuko Hohki of Japanese art-pop unit Frank Chickens, on a cool evening breeze sound that feels like dusk descending on Paris.
The 13-song album has largely endured in the underground imagination for a trio of supremely elegant standouts: the swaying tango of ‘Tendance’; a neatly tucked jazz-pop shuffler ‘Comfortable Gestures’ (which more recently featured on Music From Memory’s ‘Uneven Paths’ comp); and the silky chanson frisson of keys, horns and rude bass that underlines ‘Un Aimant Vivant’; but the whole thing plays out like a dream sequence of deeply sophisticated pop, gently guided by the prevailing ambient grooves tilled by likes of Eno & Byrne, and laced with a jazzy synth-funk sauce carried over from NYC by likes of Ramuntcho Matta and Don Cherry.
The perennially underrated Beresford was, by this point, a decade deep into his multifaceted thing, as hyper-connector of improvised music with Company, post-punk (The Slits), punky dub (New Age Steppers), and pop (The Flying Lizards), all of which are ideally distilled into this album. Switching between the groove and mic, he brings a unique attraction to each element, whether in the sizzling drum programming or his genteel voice, and deft ability to evince the best from his band and draw parallels across mediums, as inspired by the paradoxes of soft and hard textures in Beretta’s designs.
A real pleasure.
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Remastered by Translab in Paris, original gatefold artwork with a 4-page insert with liner notes by nato's Jean Rochard
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The debonaire ambient bops of Steve Beresford’s 1985 collab with fashion designer Anne Marie Beretta clearly endures on this welcome maiden reissue, newly remastered and ready to soundtrack dozens more late nights.
‘Dancing the Line’ frames prolific and pivotal improviser Beresford puckering his abundant tekkerz at the service of a charmingly finessed sound that stands far out from his prior run of work Derek Bailey’s Company. Flanked by David Toop (flute, bamboo, soprano sax), and Alan Hacker (clarinet, basset horn, soprano sax), Beresford handles Yamaha DX7, RX11 drum machine, keys and mic, often duetting with Kazuko Hohki of Japanese art-pop unit Frank Chickens, on a cool evening breeze sound that feels like dusk descending on Paris.
The 13-song album has largely endured in the underground imagination for a trio of supremely elegant standouts: the swaying tango of ‘Tendance’; a neatly tucked jazz-pop shuffler ‘Comfortable Gestures’ (which more recently featured on Music From Memory’s ‘Uneven Paths’ comp); and the silky chanson frisson of keys, horns and rude bass that underlines ‘Un Aimant Vivant’; but the whole thing plays out like a dream sequence of deeply sophisticated pop, gently guided by the prevailing ambient grooves tilled by likes of Eno & Byrne, and laced with a jazzy synth-funk sauce carried over from NYC by likes of Ramuntcho Matta and Don Cherry.
The perennially underrated Beresford was, by this point, a decade deep into his multifaceted thing, as hyper-connector of improvised music with Company, post-punk (The Slits), punky dub (New Age Steppers), and pop (The Flying Lizards), all of which are ideally distilled into this album. Switching between the groove and mic, he brings a unique attraction to each element, whether in the sizzling drum programming or his genteel voice, and deft ability to evince the best from his band and draw parallels across mediums, as inspired by the paradoxes of soft and hard textures in Beretta’s designs.
A real pleasure.