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.
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...
