Bonner Kramer Song Premiere: "Whispers for the Dead"
Tomorrow, prolific avant-garde legend Bonner Kramer caps off a busy 2025 with …and the crimson moon whispers goodbye (Shimmy-Disc), his first solo album since 2020's Joyful Noise collection via the Artist in Residence box set. Over the past two years, the producer and multi-instrumentalist has enjoyed fruitful, multi-album collaborations with Pan•American (aka Labradford vocalist and guitarist Mark Nelson) and Squanderers (his trio with guitarists David Grubbs and Wendy Eisenberg). Now, Kramer is revealing a more abstract, simultaneously mournful and celebratory side of his artistry, a described "four-part drone-poem for The Living and The Dead." In October, with the album's announcement, he shared an excerpt of "Whispers for the Damned" and a red-hued visual that inflamed the song's liminal state of alternating pitches and moods. Last month, Kramer released a portion of "Whispers for the Living", contextualized by a passage from James Joyce's The Dead and another video; the song balances drone elements with staccatos and ostinatos, repetitive and journeying instrumentation that generates its own sort of hypnosis by way of its obtuse timbres. Today, Kramer introduces new colors to the ruby palate with SILY exclusive premiere "Whispers for the Dead", whose partially black-and-white clip of folks dancing and snow falling creates an uncanny effect to match the sound itself. Listening to it, you continually second-guess yourself--Are those voices? Are we in a church?--until you decide to let the encounter become all-encompassing and ignore any preconceived notions.
In making …and the crimson moon whispers goodbye, Kramer hopes that listeners, too, interact with the album cinematically, mentally creating their own filmic narratives or image series. If you take it in deeply, only when it's over does it seem like a tangible thing that existed. Fittingly, the album includes a bonus live recording of “Music for Pianos & Sunflowers” at this year's Big Ears Festival, featuring Shahzad Ismaily. Kramer's original recording of the work consisted of three grand pianos manipulated through three vintage tape echo machines. At Big Ears, Ismaily came in for the second movement, the input at most four hands and one piano, the output a swirling, textured, ornate, and shimmering sonic experience that you don't think about being performed to other living, breathing people until you hear them clap at the end.
Along with the song premiere, I asked Kramer some questions over email about his creative process, color symbolism, his new moniker, and more. Read his responses below, edited for clarity.
...and the crimson moon whispers goodbye album art
Since I Left You: How important was it on this album for you to maintain a sense of sonic abstraction--among instruments, voices--in providing an opportunity for listeners to make their own cinematic associations with the music?
Bonner Kramer: The question presumes that I had a roadmap wherein some things were "permitted" and other things were off-limits, as if a preconceived path had to be maintained. My ego isn't that steely. My music goes wherever it wants to go, and my "job" is to help it, not to stop it or attach roadblocks to it. My composition process is wholly spontaneous, with no rules whatsoever for engagement and no goal in mind during the process itself. I'm not that kind of composer. More than anything else, I'm an improviser. I follow an unwritten flow of instincts as they present themselves to me. I play "hide & seek" with my own subconscious in a long process of performing and overdubbing in my studio, removing or editing what displeases me as I go along. And in the end, if what I am hearing sounds like nothing else I've ever heard before, I know I am done. Only then, upon completion of the music, do the cinematic aspirations rise to the surface. That's when it all makes sense to me, in the aggregate. That's when I can allow myself to hope that each listener will hear colors in their minds that are potentially vivid enough to summon visuals unique to they, themselves, from their own subconscious, haunted and blessed by the music. The LP has an "abstract" feel to it likely because the process in creating it was abstract: no rules, no barriers, no convictions. Convictions are for convicts. I go into my studio and begin. I'm speaking only for myself, here, knowing what works best for me, and what works best is a complete clearing of the mind. If my intellect gets involved while I'm performing, all is lost, and I must begin again, with an empty palette. It all begins with Nothing, in a place of Silence. The Void is my starting point.
SILY: The accompanying visual for "Whispers for the Dead" introduces black and white to the red-dominant color scheme, in clips of people dancing and snow falling. A lot of folks might associate black-and-white with the past; does this album convey a sense or passage of time, even if non-linear?
BK: TIME is the beating heart of all music. If music has a physical "place" in which it exists more than anywhere else, that place is TIME. The suggestion that music is an artform rooted firmly to "the moment" seems absurd to me. [It's] quite the contrary, in fact. If we take my seemingly habitual use of reverb as perhaps the most potent example, the so-called "present" is rendered invisible by it. We have a sound (a cello playing one note for 30 seconds, for example) that was created, in the past, passing through a reverb device--or, these days, a "plugin"--that allows that sound to splinter off and drift away over very long periods of time, IN TIME, while summoning trails of itself that reach into the future. The present no longer exists, as within this audio equation, the past and the future render the present invisible, or at the very least, irrelevant. This is why religious chorale music isn't performed on hilltops or street corners. They'd be ignored in such places. They come to life in churches, caves, or in massive cisterns in which sounds reverberate seemingly forever, inspiring the listener to enter an audio state-of-grace wherein the transcendental can be glimpsed, if not literally touched. Something happens to me when I'm immersed in such sounds: something physical, something unexplainable. And yes, color dies with the body, though I did not use [black and white] to summon the past. I used it to link the listener/viewer to the future we all share. We all die, and I'd imagine that color will be the first thing to fade away during the dying process. I hope it's not too soon before i find out whether I'm right or wrong about that, but honestly, it's not the great "answers" that interest me…it's the path we take when searching for them. The destination is little more than a curiosity. It's the road that gets all of my focus.
SILY: Why did you decide to release this album under the moniker Bonner Kramer?
BK: I simply got tired of the one-name moniker. After spending the first two years of my life in foster care as a ward of New York State, I was adopted by the Kramer family and given the name "Mark". About 15 years ago, the identity of my birth family was revealed to me. My father's name was Joel Bonner. Read the book Hit Men [: Powerbrokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business] by Fredric Dannen, and you will know what my father spent his life doing. He was a "hit man" for the music business in the 60's & 70's. Prior to that, he was a tour manager for Sam Cooke and others of that era. He couldn't even whistle a tune, but he knew great music when he heard it, and he learned how to promote it in an age that bears no resemblance to the one we are now forced to endure. I've adopted my father's last name as my first name, firstly to honor the Father i never met, and secondly for the simple reason that there are several Mark Kramers in the music business (and on Bandcamp and Spotify, etc.), one of whom is a prominent jazz pianist. So I needed a new first name: Bonner Kramer. It's just a name, but it sounds like me when i listen to it.
SILY: Have you or are you planning on performing these songs live?
BK: I have always been open to live performance, but at this moment, the only 2026 events planned are for Pan•American & Kramer (and a solo performance the next day) at Big Ears Music Festival at the end of March in Knoxville, and my 4-day residency (November 11-14) at John Zorn's The Stone in NYC, at which my trio Squanderers will perform alongside several nights of TBD solo and small group concerts.
SILY: What's next for you in the short- or long-term?
BK: CINEMA. Pure Cinema. Ambient-Cinema - "EVEN IF THE SKY IS FALLING" - a feature length narrative Audio-Dream starring Bruce Dern and the great songwriter Paul Williams, which I've been working on for years. Wish me luck. I'd have an easier time raising $300M for a superhero movie than I've had raising $2M for a small, character-driven film with Dern, the last of the great American actors still alive on this earth. You think that now is the worst time ever for the music business? You have no idea. Film is at the forefront of that sad parade.
SILY: Is there anything you've been listening to, watching, or reading lately that's inspired you or caught your attention?
BK: Victor Erice's Close Your Eyes is the best film I've seen in recent memory. It goes where few films have ever gone before.
Institute Benjamenta by The Brothers Quay is still keeping me up at night. It's based upon the works of one of my favorite writers, Robert Walser, in particular his novel Jakob von Gunten, though the film refers in depth to several of his works.
And I'm still reading and re-reading W.G. Sebald, particularly his 4th and final work, Austerlitz. That book is alive.
I must confess that I don't listen to much music, especially after 8 or 10 hours working in my studio, but when I do listen to music, it's very often the solo piano recordings of Bill Evans (or the great Trio with Scott LaFaro), or The Sinking of the Titanic by Gavin Bryars, which I can never get enough of. Inspiration is for amateurs, but if you put a gun to my head and force me to tell you whose music continues to "inspire" me, it's Bryars, Morton Feldman (listen to his "Rothko Chapel"), and Pauline Oliveros. They are the three great Masters.
John Cage started it all with 4′33″, and I still read his writings, but I do so more for my Life, than for my Music.
