Black Hoodie Ensemble

About Bernard II

“Black velvet under white sheets”

The tactile line in album opener “Black Flowers” effectively captures the texture of Bernard II as a whole; Lush, enveloping and elegantly designed to make your skin crawl.

Bernard II presents an urgent, rhythm centered approach to post-rock evocative of albums like CAN’s Ege Bamyasi and Swans’ To Be Kind while continuing to build upon the dark soundscapes constructed in Black Hoodie Ensemble’s 2020 album Captain that was praised as “innovative,” “well-produced,” and “more than the sum of its parts.”

Writer, producer and primary musician for Black Hoodie Ensemble, Jet Jobob Rodel, describes Bernard II as his “own personal version of The Twilight Zone”, and the title of the album is a salute to luminary American composer Bernard Hermann who created the original score for the touchstone television series along with numerous paradigmatic suspense classics like Citizen Kane, Psycho, and Taxi Driver. 

“Bernard Hermann is a master of mood, and I was listening to his scores for Taxi Driver, Vertigo and Twilight Zone almost exclusively when I was writing the early songs that set the direction for this record” says Rodel. “That and some of the more insidious shit from Pusha T, Schoolboy Q and Griselda.”

Once the Hermann connection has been established it can’t be unheard. Lyrically in the dystopian themes of album opener “Black Flowers” and the playfully ghoulish tale in “Purple Before Midnight,” the atonal minimalism of “Missing Number”, and, most glaringly, in the spacey keyboards, pizzicato strings and lazy droning horns of “Sleepwalking (The Nights Don’t End)”. The fingerprints are everywhere.

If 2020’s Captain was an isolated walk through the woods on a late summer night, Bernard II is a distinctly colder, more metropolitan and paranoid journey. Vast sweeping soundscapes close in to arms length where the persistent driving drums and melodies attempt to infiltrate the listeners deepest thoughts, weaving themselves into their subconscious. These “exhausting grooves” in the words of Rodel are used to great effect on the tracks “Heavyweight” and “The Double” which also features an unexpected, and satisfying verse from Austin rapper Blakchyl.

“I think this will be the weirdest I get for a while” joked Rodel regarding some of the new musical directions and production styles on Bernard II. After the central themes and direction were established, the recording process was markedly different from previous Black Hoodie Ensemble records. Most tracks started with freestyle drum takes from percusionists Matt Judson, Neil Durr and Lemuel Hayes without any song structure or backing tracks at all aside from a metronome keeping time. Then from hundreds of drum takes, samples were pieced together to form a cohesive song structure that Rodel and a number of collaborators could layer additional elements over. While this writing approach is fairly common in modern electronic music and hip-hop production, it’s still quite unorthodox in music with more “traditional rock band” drums, guitar and bass centered instrumentation. “It was more just chopping up drums and putting them back together. Kind of like a puzzle” says Rodel. “I feel it’s just a product of me getting better at mixing and getting what I’m hearing in my head.” says Rodel.

The Black Hoodie Ensemble principle claims his first childhood memory is a dream where a giant version of one of his John Carter toys was trying to kill him, which seems to have been something of an early omen for the Artist. “Things that aren’t quite right always seem to draw me in.” says Rodel. “Thoughtfully strange things like The Twilight Zone, horror and more modern David Lynch have always inspired me. In terms of music, I think the future is Death Grips… Maybe 100 Gecs is the closest to the future we’re going to get… but I also think the world is going to end soon.” 

While not all listeners may share the same pessimism on humanity’s imminent doom, most can agree that there are certainly worse soundtracks to imagine it all unraveling to than Bernard II.