Today's
news is that American actor Morgan Freeman will be making his music industry
debut with a blues album. Just to continue my little stream of consciousness,
Alessandro "Asso" Stefana, among other things PJ Harvey's guitarist, have
released a blues album in 2024. And now this "Windrose" by Sebastian
Brown, aka Daniele Mattioni, has landed on my desk.
An album
that is the exact German translation (read: krautrock) of the devil's music of
Charley Patton and many other pioneers of pre-war folk. It's all in the opening
track "Westwards": fourteen minutes and forty-one seconds of pure
shamanic hypnosis that culminates in echoes and reverberations worthy of
"Tago Mago." And that's already a miracle.
It's 2026,
not the 1990s. Listeners are increasingly distracted. Music isn't even on
Spotify, but on TikTok, as an accompaniment to trashy dance routines. They have
to captivate you in a few seconds, or else face eternal oblivion.
Brown/Mattioni doesn't: he aims for attentive listening, for the kind of
audience you gain after a series of sessions with the needle on the vinyl (or
the CD in the player, if you prefer), because the atmosphere and the journey
are all that matters.
Yes,
shamanism: we're somewhere near Jodorowski, perhaps even Castaneda. Add a pinch
of Vic Chestnutt (not quite as skewed, but that's beside the point) to a song
like "Windrose," and you're almost there: here's the intimate
post-rock of "Northwards," with its gentle percussion introducing a
textbook example of ritual songwriting.
Finally,
the concluding “Southwards” takes everything and spins it around, reiterating
that even today, so that an experimentation could come from here and, even if
lacking the rough edges of the originals, still has the feeling of the second
generation of post-rock (from Sigur Ròs to Godspeed… ), abandoning its
magniloquence and awareness of experimentation in favor of a more painful
feeling that does not renounce its liturgical nature (with a touch of Swans).
How then
can we not recommend you to lose yourself in the music of a work that, in just
under forty minutes, manages to deliver, from its base in Italy, an
unspecified, unidentified object that nevertheless draws from the best of the
music of the past decades to transport you into a world that, all things
considered, has also a certain amount of originality?
Released
this month, the album also boasts a minimalist cover that nevertheless captures
all the merits of the musical work it is destined to present. Light and shadow,
their coincidence, but without duplicity and easy psychologisms: only the
sense of a cyclical return, of wandering within oneself at the risk of never
returning to the way one started. Which, after all, should be the ambition of
every journey...
There WAS a time when creating music was as
intense as giving shape to your own feelings, emotions, memories. To an image
of yourself you wanted to give to the world for all to see. A time when music
wasn’t only business, but also something purer. Not by chance a musician like
Daniel Johnston was loved by many successful artists such as Kurt Cobain. I
attended to a festival in Italy where Johnston was supposed to play, but in the
end he refused for health reasons.
Those were the days. You were entitled to risk
not to listen to one of your idols, but in the end you had anyway a music that
was a pure ode to love. On the other hand you had musicians that, as Bono sang
many years before, had to “kill their inspiration and sing about the grief”. It
wasn’t so easy to choose, but in the end the choice was there for you to grab
it. The world was full of musicians similar to Johnston.
Another one was Vic Chestnutt, a
singer/songwriter who released his first proper record – not the self produced
tapes of Johnston – in 1990 and happy, so to speak, to give life to his musical
vision until his death in 2009. Someone else has survived to his own demons,
like Mark Oliver Everett, leader of the band Eels. Mr. E’s music is possibly
the most similar to the music of Mark Linkous aka Sparklehorse, today’s hero.
Just one year after Chestnutt death, in 2010,
Linkous passed away shooting himself directly into the heart. He not only
suffered for many years of a severe form of depression, not only was a heroin
addicted, but he also saw his marriage gone into pieces, and sometimes things
are too much. We thought so that the posthumous Dark Night of the Soul, a
record produced by Danger Mouse and with a cover designed by David Lynch, was his
last release,.
But time has many surprises for everyone, and
for us it’s the time for a new album by Sparklehorse. Bird Machine is its
title. The recordings found at his home were almost complete, and they needed
only some slight retouch. Notes on Linkous diary were almost impeccable, near
perfection, so one of three Mark’s brothers, Matt, had no difficulty in issuing
with the label Anti- a record faithful to Linkous’ will.
Opened by It Will Never Stop, with his drum
machine and a computer filtered guitar, the album starts with a surreal mood
where restlesness and a certain humour are mixing together. Kind Ghosts is
filled with kindly reversed sounds sparsed through the melody along with other
strange sounds that remind of Radiohead’s most experimental music, even though
the melody is well defined.
Evening Star Supercharger is for many one of
the best songs of the album. A “perfect” pop song whose atmosphere makes you
ask yourself why for someone is so difficult to heal themselves since they’re
so good at exorcising your demons: it’s just a mystery. I had to listen to a
couple of time the arpeggioed guitar and the melodies since they’re simply too
chrystalline just to have been given birth by a tortured soul, but they’re here
to remember us that reality is not black and white, simply.
O Child, for piano and a softly blown of
voice, ends with a coda made of sounds that seem to come from another dimension
and a field recording of a baby in it and it is possibly the most intriguing
song on the album. Falling Down, with its Waitsian title and a perfect pop
countenance it’s almost a hymn for all those moments when we see things get
worse and unable to stop it, with a use of the metaphores that start with
marvel and ends with concreteness.
I Fucked It Up is another song as we heard at
the beginning, and the most similar to Eels’ most straight r’n’r pieces. Hello
Lord, with its acoustic guitar and a filtered, doubled voice, it’s the peace
before or after the storm, whereas Daddy’s Gone it’s pure Beatles in their
essence of songwriting. Chaos of the Universe is a song built around an
interesting wall of sound made of guitars and various keyboards.
Listening to the Higsongs, Robyn Hitchcock’s
cover, with its jangling guitars, makes you realize that for the entire record
Albini gave life to a production respectful of the will of the artist instead
than producing a record with drums and bass deep and resonating as it happened
to In Utero and Rid of Me, showing how flexible it is as a producer.
Everybody’s Gone to Sleep is another beautiful ballad full of a ‘reversed
sadness’, with everybody’s sleeping but the main character of the song,
deprived of his love.
The Scull of Lucia is a melody for a music box,
that type of found sound that Linkous can’t miss in its own music, Blue is
basically a bassline nurtured with some sparse guitars over the main line and
finally we arrive to Stay, a melancholic ask for proximity. In many songs the
most used and intriguing device is to reverse the feelings expressed by both
the lyrics and the music, before leaving come out the real imagines from
Linkous fantasy.
A record created around contrasts and the
feeling of a bitter sadness mostly transfigured as if music can really save
yourself from harshness of life, nurtured with a faith in the art, that means
ultimately in men, Bird Machine is Sparklehorse last gift to our world, with
the hope to give someone in need a ray of light through the darkness.
