One of the wonderfully positive takeaways from the frightening global pandemic has been witnessing artists find creative ways to not only produce new music that lifts the spirits, but supports their community in ways hitherto unseen. Particularly true of the Malta-born, London based dream-pop duo Berne, who are equal parts environmentalists and animal rights activists as they are musicians. It’s the launch of their Common Ground project that has seen them initiate a music live stream platform for other artists, rather than themselves.
I mention that they got this off the ground remarkably quickly; the first Common Ground ‘gig’ took place within the first week of the UK lockdown. “It’s something we’d been wanting to do for a while,” singer and synth-player Deborah Borg Brincat explains.
“We’d been paying close attention to the situation in other countries. We got a strong sense a lockdown was coming and our gigs would be cancelled. So we created Common Ground and just went for it! So every Sunday afternoon, we invite independent artists to takeover our Instagram and do a 25 minute show, plus a short Q+A with us and the audience. It’s a way of giving a platform to artists who’ve been affected badly by the situation.”
Guitarist, effects wizard and producer Gianluca Pulvirenti points out that Berne are not “booking agents, event promoters or anything like that. We’re just musicians wanting to perform and wanting to give other artists that opportunity as well. Also living together, having our home studio here has meant we can perform just as we would at a Berne show, from our living room, which has been great.”
Berne have been steadily building their name in the saturated London music scene, quickly becoming regulars in the capital’s live music circuit and honing their reverb-laden sounds that bring to mind London Grammar, The xx and Wolf Alice. Their focus on community certainly makes sense when bearing in mind their membership at the London and L.A-based music collective, The Rattle.
“The mission of Berne is to inspire people to make small changes, and remind them that we are better together,” Borg Brincat says. “It’s better for everybody to do something imperfectly than for one person to do it perfectly. And The Rattle have helped us a lot with that!”
“What is The Rattle, Deborah?”, Pulvirenti adds as a polite nudge. “It’s a highly-curated artist collective in East London with a team of experts across the board (which includes Imogen Heap) who seek to get your music to the next level.”
The mission of Berne has seen the release them release three singles: To The Lions, Oceans and Stay, the latter having a stunning stop-motion video that sees a visibly upset Planet Earth caught in a tug of war between two sets of humans.
Both Berne members follow a vegan lifestyle, and Borg Brincat explains that To The Lions is a song about “betrayal, but our interpretation of betrayal from the perspective of a farmed animal. And the choice that we make, even three times a day to be less-than-kind to some animals — and the repercussions of that choice. However, as much as it is inspired by Jonathan Safran Foer’s book, Eating Animals, we do also approach lyrics as an abstract art-form that can apply to any part of people’s lives.”