*2024 stock* Berlin Strings is a string quartet consisting of Lisa Marie Vogel, Johanna Wundling, Tabea Haarmann-Thiemann and Luisa Babarro Fernández. Since meeting in the National Youth Orchestra and founding Berlin Strings 13 years ago, they have developed into explorers of their own sound. A sound that has always been imbued with the discipline of classical music, pure craftsmanship, the sublime rules of composition that make communication wordless. But also experimentation, flirting with dissonance and arrhythmia, with cuts and loops, the electronically constructed substructure that becomes the driving force behind many string arrangements on her first album. An architecture that works because it is always centred around violins, viola and cello.

That was the challenge when Berlin Strings set out in the midst of pandemic paralysis to actively search for collaborators for an album that is above all courageous because its makers relinquished control over the compositions that they would later record in turn. "On A Dark Night" has become such an approachable album because it tells of the trust between artists from a wide range of disciplines, sound activists, arrangers and film musicians, who were guided solely by the working title "Play It On A Dark Night", a poem by musician and poet Patti Smith and an Edward Hopper painting.

The album therefore contains a promise: That complexity does not have to sound hermetic. That danceability and introspection fit into the same arc. That music can be complicated, but not in an exclusive way, but in a way that you want to understand, one that allows a number of approaches. And in all of this, Berlin Strings stand for the fact that classical music can be more than the ingenious solo efforts of lone wolves. Especially when they succeed, as can be heard on "On A Dark Night", in playing and interpreting music in a way that is both light and exciting for our perception.