Sebastian Brown - Windrose (Beautiful Losers, 2026)

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...