Charlie Bertsch

Tucson

Music and Film Editor at The Battleground

I write. I edit. I teach. And I love a cherry pie. You can also find me @cbertsch.bsky.social

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Articles

Sounds for a Dark Age

1 day ago | thebattleground.eu | Charlie Bertsch

Even the most beat-forward tracks, “Oneironaut sei wachsam” and “Die Ratten”, sound like they are being ripped apart by centrifugal force. Others, such as “Souterrain” and the finale “Nichts”, feel like dispatches from the ruins mentioned in the album’s title, pieced together from fragments that exhibit magnetic repulsion. Once you know that Das Kinn (The Chin) is the name Frankfurt sound artist Toben Piel chose for his one-man band, this makes a lot of sense.
Finding Another Gear

2 weeks ago | thebattleground.eu | Charlie Bertsch

Abyss draws from all of Anika’s previous work, which ranges from the crackly, dub-adjacent grooves of her eponymous debut, through the muscular post-punk she released with the group Exploded View, to the delicate, ambient-inflected soundscapes of 2023’s Eat Liquid. The result is a supple mode of Dark Wave, accessible to a broad audience, but still tough as nails.
To Shoot or Not to Shoot

3 weeks ago | thebattleground.eu | Charlie Bertsch

A documentary directed by the married team of Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane, it chronicles the quixotic attempt by Crane and his fellow actor Mark Oosterveen to stage a production of William Shakespeare’s tragedy within the video game Grand Theft Auto Online during the pandemic. It soon becomes apparent that this seemingly extreme circumstance is distressingly similar to what passes for normal these days. Finding people who have the time, interest, and ability to make any play a success is hard.
Primal America

4 weeks ago | thebattleground.eu | Charlie Bertsch

That’s what I kept telling myself this past Friday as I fought to stay focused on my first concert experience since Donald Trump returned to the White House. I was thrilled when an online acquaintance who recently moved to my home of Tucson, Arizona, suggested that we meet in person for the first time at a concert.
Sonic Warfare

1 month ago | thebattleground.eu | Charlie Bertsch

Protests that began in response to the fatal collapse of a train station roof in Novi Sad last November have mushroomed into something much bigger. Because Serbia’s population is less than 7 million, the fact that upwards of 300,000 people may have participated in the 15 March event is remarkable. Fifteen people died at the scene of the Novi Sad tragedy, which has been blamed on shoddy workmanship and a corrupt government inspection process.
A Populist for Progressives

1 month ago | thebattleground.eu | Charlie Bertsch

Rather than hammering the last nail into its coffins, as many pundits feared, AI opened the lid. Evidence of this increasingly forceful haunting abounds.
Warning From the Franco Era

1 month ago | thebattleground.eu | Charlie Bertsch

Adolescent Ofelia and her pregnant mother travel to a remote area of Spain in the summer of 1944 to join the girl’s stepfather, Captain Vidal, whose unit is hunting down resistance fighters holding out in the surrounding mountains. As soon becomes apparent, Vidal isn’t just a functionary of Francisco Franco’s Falangist regime, but someone who takes both pride and pleasure in doing his job as cruelly as possible.
Silencing the Opposition

1 month ago | thebattleground.eu | Charlie Bertsch

He surely wasn’t expecting to be the subject of a criminal investigation as a consequence. After all, making that kind of declaration has been standard fare for musicians since the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” denounced the late monarch and “her fascist regime” nearly fifty years ago. But, the right to criticise public figures within democracies can no longer be taken for granted.
Learning From the Black Panthers

2 months ago | thebattleground.eu | Charlie Bertsch

Assembled from footage shot for Swedish television during that period, then found in storage three decades later, the film combines interviews conducted at the time with voiceover segments in which prominent African-Americans reflect on the legacy of Black Power. The persecution of people who protested the war in Gaza and the demonisation of the Black Lives Matter movement demonstrate that the state no longer feels the need to mute its power, transporting us back to the Watergate Era.
The Italian Job

2 months ago | thebattleground.eu | Charlie Bertsch

Although the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s is a common touchstone these days, it is also important to pay attention to the final years of the Cold War and the “New World Order” – as American President George H. W. Bush famously described it – that followed in its wake. That’s when the reactionary neoliberalism of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan was reimagined as a new kind of culture war.