A law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak on the matter said that Berman was found on Wednesday in an apartment building in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, and pronounced dead at the scene.

A spokeswoman for the city’s medical examiner said that Berman had hanged himself, and ruled it suicide.

As the sole constant member of Silver Jews, which sometimes included well-known musicians like Stephen Malkmus of Pavement, Berman released six albums using the band name, beginning with “Starlite Walker” in 1994 and continuing through “Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea” in 2008, before disbanding the group the next year.

Berman’s association with Pavement — he had founded Silver Jews in 1989 with Malkmus, once a fellow student at the University of Virginia — brought him a certain level of underground fame in the early 1990s. He also earned the respect of critics, who saw Berman as a rare poetic voice in the snarky, noisy world of ’90s rock. Rolling Stone once called him “a wandering honky-tonk bard murmuring feverish, fractured one-liners in his handsome country-rock drawl.”