BEARING (2015 - ongoing)
Bernd & Johanna insist that to hear (and to see) is to bear - and that to bear is to transform. In listening to Bearing we participate in the iterative logic of the work - our minds become further sites of inscription. And though at least since Freud's "Wunderblock" we might say that all sense experience is always also such re-writing, Bernd & Johanna make the distortion of registry, of re- cognition, their sole subject and drama. Whereas the A-Side's anonymous sensuality (its attempt to lull the identificatory violence of writing) suggests a not unknown poetics of the supplement, the B-Side documents the limits of recursive difference - of formalized, mechanical differentiation folding in on itself into erasure (rhythmic attacks smoothing out into a near static band of digital surface). In offering two disjunct moments of this paradoxically homogenizing process (the two sides), another difference - another register of transformation - is allowed to emerge. The album, a dissonant whole, insists that it is not enough to simply take in the mutation of recording. The album, this self-differing object, asks that we also have - or take - a bearing on such 'bearing' - that the ethics of audition lie not only in the hands of the authors.
Bill Dietz, 2017
