Children's
songs for adults. That's how Knight Berman Jr once
described the music he writes and records as the Marble Tea, but it
doesn't tell the full story. Grown-up topics like hiding from the law,
excruciating ennui, and impotence have all found their way into songs
in some fashion or another, and his affirmation that "I haven't met a
child yet that I could sit and have a smoke with" further distances us
from that original statement.
Berman's I'm
Batman EP was selected as CD of
the Year for 2004 at IndepenDisc.com,
and three of his recordings were featured in the toddler-friendly LittleWalks New York
video. Along the way, he's contributed to a compilation of
"tiny pop songs," tribute records to Richard Brautigan and the Jazz
Butcher, and provided theme music for cartoons on the internet.
Through an
unpretentious brand of indie pop, his 2006 Fantastic
Day EP examined the underlying connection
between life's smallest things with the grander design behind it all,
and the English/Drake
Single (Summer 2007) chronicles adventures in
feline domesticity.
So what does the
music sound like? Comparisons to the Magnetic Fields, Jonathan Richman,
Robyn Hitchcock, early Beck, the Kinks - even "a happy Lou Reed" - have
all been made and may serve as a nice starting point.
He recently
finished scoring his first full-length film, and is currently scoring a series of short films for NewMystics.com. He is also working
on numerous other projects which may or may not reach completion.