Brooklyn and Berlin-based duo rescues discarded tape deck to cut tracks for Brazilian-influenced debut EP as Take Berlin.
Hear the first single “Vermona,” the true story of a girl who escapes to the west in the trunk of a car, via BlackBook now.
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Take Berlin (L-R): Jesse Barnes, Yvonne Ambrée. Photo Credit: Fabrizio del Rincon.
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“Vermona” is the first single from the “Lionize” EP by Take Berlin
“‘Vermona’ was the first song we wrote together,” says Take Berlin’s Jesse Barnes of bandmate Yvonne Ambrée. “The song focuses on the true story of a girl who is raised by her grandmother after the mother escapes to the West in the trunk of a car.” Even with the heavy subject matter, “Vemona” is still hopeful, mainly because of the existing reality of these children (the girl in the song, Ambrée herself, and countless others) grew up under communist rule. “They were experiencing the world for the first time and since they had nothing to compare it to, the world was still a beautiful place,” explains Barnes.
The “Vermona” of the title refers to an actual East German musical instrument company. Ambrée acquired a Vermona synthesizer from her grandmother, and through the song, the keyboard is personified to represent all the stories and “relics” from East Berlin. “Of course, Vermona also sounds like a woman’s name,” says Barnes.
Take Berlin’s upcoming “Lionize” EP represents the first collaborative effort from these two established musical talents. For their “day jobs,” Barnes can be found playing guitar with Eli “Paperboy” Reed, Lulu Gainsbourg, and Aloe Blaccamong others, and Ambrée is an in-demand backing vocalist with some of Germany’s biggest artists, and more recently with US-based acts such as Syl Johnson, Kendra Morris and Sleigh Bells.
In the winter of 2011, Barnes pulled a discarded cassette deck from a snowy pile of trash in Brooklyn. Nearly two years later, this impulse has proven instrumental in contributing to the course of his musical career, as just a few months after rescuing the tape deck, chance led Barnes to Ambrée for the first time. They soon formed Take Berlin and a half-dozen trips across the Atlantic later (Barnes is based in Brooklyn, Ambrée is based in Berlin), the duo has now finished the debut Take BerlinEP “Lionize,” realizing the greater fate of that discarded tape deck which was used to record all of the EP’s basic tracks.
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