SkyRider

underground hip-hop

Ten days in a coma and SkyRider is reborn. Bud Berning awoke in a Mexican hospital tied to a bed, one eye sewn shut, and body crushed. Tubes ran in and out of his body. Countless machines bleep-bleeped incessantly. Bud had suffered serious head trauma, was heavily medicated, and plagued by hallucinations for a sleepless week. He did not know where he was or how he had gotten there. The time passed slowly and the world rushed on. When Bud Berning was reassembled from his scattered pieces and fused with the inorganic; his former passions being hindered by a broken body, he found art in technology. With his computer and a few hacked programs, he stitched together musical tapestries from the destruction and the mending of organic sounds that, like his body, were collaborations between natural and artificial functions. With his debut album 47:34 released under the name SkyRider, released on the Canadian label Endemik Music, the listener experiences the ether of the subconscious permeating into traumatized reality. The album flows in psychedelic bursts of swirling sounds with hiccuping rhythms which are startlingly interrupted by sobering relics of reality. Each song resonates of the melancholy and appreciation of a life almost taken, it is an opus to the resilience of man, yet each song a concession to the fragility of man's condition. When asked to simulate his album live, Berning called together a band that could recreate the sporadic and eclectic sounds f...