Like the sound explorers Keiji Haino and Vashti Bunyan, Jessica Nicole Collins has channeled complex moods through BERU‘s stream-of-consciousness applique since her 2006 year-end single "Spaces In Time". Her live engineered sound collages would completely envelop venues and listeners, emanating existential themes and affectations of world-weariness. But her newest EP “Adult Emotions” is different.
“For this EP, I wanted to make music with sounds that I’ve loved since I was a child.”
Just as the title suggests, BERU’s newest collection is mature in conception: dense and measured, wistful and purgative. But the songs are also an eidetic recollection of innocence in the eye of loss.
“One of my best friends passed away last year, and I needed to set my emotions to music from a time before I knew pain like this. I have to sing about my loss, so I can look at it from the outside and try and understand it.”
She tags the release with descriptors like “island goth”, “smooth rock”, “newage”, and “doom metal”, and rightfully so — these influences, and more, are abound in each of the six songs. Collins recites ‘90s adolescence by memory, from Yucatan pan flutes, Miami Vice, “the chillest of beats Enigma used,” and Bryan Adams’ suave guitar-lead auras.
BERU’s EP “Adult Emotions” is available now, free to stream on Bandcamp. Her next performance will be on December 5th, to help celebrate the sophomore album release of Los Angeles’ synthpop/goth trio Ghost Noise at Non Plus Ultra. Watch the music video for "Darker Currents", directed by Michael Norquest, below. – Ryan Mo