Smog Check Thursdays: Andrew Berardini + Lavender Diamond

Andrew Berardini

Reflecting on the book Colors (Not a Cult, 2023), Chris Kraus wrote, “Andrew Berardini is an adept at seeing.” As an editor and curator, Berardini has had past collaborations and exhibitions with MOCA, Los Angeles; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; and the Estonian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. He has authored hundreds of essays for museums and art spaces including for the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and SFMOMA, San Francisco. He is best known for his personal writing about art, backboned by analysis and embodied with levity, sensuality, and invention.

A contributor to Artforum since 2006 and former critic for LA Weekly, he has been a contributing editor at Art Agenda, Mousse, and Momus. Since 2008, he has been faculty at the artist-run free school the Mountain School of Arts, Los Angeles, and for some years ran a residency for art writers at the Banff Centre in Canada. A recipient of the Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Art Writing Grant, Andrew’s past labors include being the public writer for Pierre Huyghe, an editorial assistant at Semiotext(e), and the writer-in-residence at the Institute for Art and Olfaction. He currently lives in California.

Lavender Diamond with Steve Gregoropoulos

Amidst the purple flowers of the jacarandas and the spidery fingers of the graying birches, a long low breeze sweeps the rosy blush off the end of spring, wheezing the last of the cotton out of the cottonwoods and the last petals from the wild poppies hiding in greenish leaves soon sepiaed and tanned by the long shearing shine of summer sunlight. In the gathering dusk light, as the evening star twinkles in the pink creams and violent swirls of coming night, you can hear in that breeze that steals away spring the twilit song of Lavender Diamond.

The murmurs of myths tell of a time in crystal caverns where song and light changed seamlessly, with dreamy joys and slippery laughter. A thieving miner plucked from this cavern the singing jewel, Lavender Diamond. And when he brought her into the day, her power of song vanished. Sold and ringed onto the delicate hand of a noble maiden, Lavender Diamond dazzled a talkative magpie who swallowed the stone whole. Dying on the banks of cool stream, the magpie and the stolen diamond dissolved together. A new bird was born and Lavender Diamond regained her song. 

In Lavender Diamond, one can hear the coolness of that distant cavern, the brilliance of a thousand luminous crystals emanating a single pure unbroken ray that shines through meretricious cynicism and easy despair to bring hope, rebirth, possibilities.

The legend of Lavender Diamond first emerged through the performances of chanteuse and comedienne Becky Stark who quickly gathered together a coterie of musicians and friends to fully realize the crystalline hymns of the legendary songbird. The musical outfit known as Lavender Diamond emerged from chrysalis with their first EP Cavalry of Light with a band composed of Stark, pianist Steve Gregopoulous, guitarist Jeffrey Rosenberg, and drummer (and acclaimed comics artist) Ron Rege, Jr. An unlikely confluence of Burt Bacharach and Fugazi, Vashti Bunyan and the Human League, Minnie Pearl and the Beatles, their first full length album, Imagine Our Love was critically claimed by Pitchfork (“a band willing to plunge unreservedly into its own aesthetic world-- to embrace theatrical bombast without stopping to look over its shoulder” and the BBC  (“ showcases the classically-trained Stark’s dauntingly impressive vocal range to stunning effect.” But was also beloved by the masses, hypnotized children, turned water into wine, cause spontaneous weeping with joy, and even if none of the above happened precisely, it at least manifested a Utopic vision of mythic beauty, country charm, and a sweetly subversive, psychedelic soul. 

Lead singer Stark embodies all those traits and more, an earnest joy marked with a comedic self-awareness, whose storytelling skills are the stuff of folklore. She has been called Ramblin’ Becky Stark by no less than Ramblin’ Jack Elliot.  Founder of the LA Ladies Choir, member of the Living Sisters with Inara George and Eleni Mandell, performing with John C. Reilly with a record produced by Jack White, Becky Stark, with her seraphic voice crests and carries, inspires and gambols with a multitude of talented partners in crime. She has stood on stage with Brian Wilson at the Disney Concert Hall and sung with Pete Seeger at the Newport Folk Festival (and belted out Heart’s “Crazy on You” with the Decembrists). At 17, she starred as Snow White on TV and not long ago she borrowed a guitar from David Byrne to do a sing-a-long with Cindy Sherman and Miranda July at the New York Public Library. Her songstressing for Lavender Diamond however forms the spiritual core of her illustrious musicmaking.

With starry-eyed visions and orchestral sweep, Lavender Diamond is a joyful assembly, born out of a fable and into sound.

–Andrew Berardini

Steve Gregoropoulos is a composer, arranger, producer, and songwriter working in Los Angeles. He will be orchestrating Moonflower Marie, the forthcoming Lavender Diamond opera. He studied composition with Schoenberg’s amanuensis at Oberlin Conservatory and has written five full length symphonies and two operas. Scenes from his opera Good Grief were performed by bass baritone Dean Elzinga and his operatic setting of Under Milkwood will be completed this year. His most recent solo album Visitation Square is scheduled for release in the immediate future.