Ken Waxman at JazzWeekly
Aided by the electronic wizardry of Berserker’s production – both pre-and-post – and using delays, distortion, double tracking and feedback, his bass clarinet and soprano saxophone textures combine, divide and contort throughout. The overall effect is as if the members of a woodwind or saxophone combo were recorded as they receive electro convulsive therapy.
To get particular, Planques is more-or-less a recital, with its seven linked tracks evolving from staccato air expelled through the saxophone’s body tube to showcasing expansive undulating note formations, lip squeaks and overblowing. Here wave forms sequentially dissolve and solidify, making the vibrating tinctures of color audible as well as the initially tongued note, and often exposing two distinct tones.
Regularly multi-tracked and distorted, Zoepf’s two horns on Production: Berserker utilize more of these aural comparisons – often reaching the status of non-reed instruments. Along with the saxophonist’s triple-tongued flutters and swarming buzzing trills is processing that causes chords to resonate wind-tunnel-like as if they come from a church organ. Bass clarinet played without a mouthpiece can sound like col legno string techniques, while flanged, tremolo soprano saxophone distortions take on jew’s harp-like twanging. Elsewhere overblown feedback pulled from a brace of bass clarinets is altered and converted into psychedelic-era electric guitar riffs.


Indefinite sustain that could result from using an e-bow on guitar strings also makes an appearance as well. But perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise, since in the past the saxophonist, has collaborated with players like Hans Tammen, who specialize in similar guitar experimentation. Zoepf is evidentially interested in exposing exceptional or universal properties, not ones directly related to metal, reeds, ligature or keys.
Tracks are sometimes pointillist, assembled in dribs and dabs from understated intermezzo expansions, or more spectacularly stitched together from glottal stopping, hocketing, subdivided chirping or the use of several mics to amplify fingernail scratches to percussion. Delay and modulation allow reed tones – computer generated or not – to reflect back onto themselves, while the nearly 20-minute final “hidden” track is constructed from strident wave-form distortions, a centerpiece of pure silence – at least to the human ear – and a cumulative postlude that shrills ever noisier reed tones.
With such bravura performances, the CD suggests that its proper appreciation of comes from listening to individual tracks, rather than trying the entire CD at one sitting.