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...
Fist came, as far as I can remember, Dead Can
Dance, with Lisa Gerrard and her invented, dark but also dreamy language, that
also a psychologist with an attention for the Occult like Carl Gustav Jung
could admire. Then, it was the time for Sigur Ròs and their vonlenska / hopelandic, also know as “the language of hope”. Who can’t remember
the beauty of songs as Hjartað hamast(bamm bamm bamm), also present in movies such as Immortal Ad Vitam by Enki Bilal in a scene where the glorious Linda Hardy starts understanding what she as a human being is?
Not to mention, for those who come from my own
country, Italy, a musician like Fabrizio de André who, in an album like Creuza
de mä (Ricordi, 1984), sang in a mix of slang from Genova, arabic language and
invented words over a texture of music played with ethnic and also invented
instruments. That was, in the words of Mauro Pagani, musician and producer who
worked on that record, like to give life to a “dream music”, more than to an
album of world music in the proper sense, and with Spira (Tanca, 2023) by
Daniela Pes, an album of electronic and experimental sounds, we’re basically on
the same ground.
Daniela Pes, born in Sardinia, Italy, in 1992,
has a degree in jazz singing taken at the Sassari Conservatory, and studied
subsequently under the direction of Paolo Fresu, one of the most recognized and
acclaimed jazz musicians in my country. Thanks to those studies she exhibited
in Rio De Janeiro at the Harp Festival. After some important prizes, Pes
started developing her own vision, that is, and this album is great to give
every listener a proper idea, a little bit different from every previous music
output.
Sardinia
is a great land for music and contamination. I think about Paolo
Angeli and his Sardinian prepared guitar, that is a step into the tradition
and at the same time a step into the avant-garde. Daniela Pes music is in the
same groove, so to speak. After a period in which she gave life to music for
poems, she found out composing music this way was too limiting for her, and so
she created a language of her own with fragments of words from the slang from
Gallura, the part of Sardinia she comes from, Italian and Latin languages where
meaning is less important than the feeling itself.
The
result is an evocative music, where electronic instruments fuse with acoustic
guitars and gentle, small percussions. Not less important, the record was
produced by Iosonouncane – whose real name is Jacopo Incani – another musician
coming from Daniela Pes birthplace whose music is well known in my country and
whose productions, along with his original material, are highly praised. Jacopo
contributed with a couple of songs as co-writer and with arrangements,
synthesizers and other instruments, even if Daniela Pes is mostly responsible
for the sounds and the production herself.
Someone
wrote that sometimes Pes music can be related to the experimental albums of
Franco Battiato. If that means a mix of songrwriting and far out, unusual
sounds and structures, they’re right, but don’t exspect higlhly distorted
sounds or alarm sirens-like sounds or those kind of dissonances: Pes music is
an intimate and intimistic experience for people who want to collect themselves
into their own instinct, just to use Pes words, and feelings above all.
Ca
Mira, the opening track on the album, begins with a voice melody that seems to
come from Carnatic or Middle East music – but in an interview Pes stated that
she loves music from Israel, Armenia and that region of the world in general,
along with Italian songwriters such as Ivano Fossati, Francesco De Gregori and
Lucio Battisti – accompanied with a drone, but that after a couple of minutes
evolves into an open space of electronic heartbeats welcomed by a rain of small
percussions, where voice and electronic instruments give life to a proper sonic
landscape in crescendo. After, some vocal glitches accompany a nice vocal
melody.
Illa
Sera is possibly the best choice for a radio broadcast in order to present the
album: there are verses and choruses, along with loops embellishing Pes
exquisite vocal performance. Pes voice througout the entire album is sometimes
raucous but always subdued to a certain meditative mood. Key to Carme is,
instead, minimalism, the minimalism that caractherizes some of the best
productions by Laurie Anderson just to name one, but with an openly emotional
quality instead of the NY artist attempt to create some Brechtian estrangement.
The
short Ora is a track in the name of a murmured text and some sounds that made
me recall to my mind some productions by Tom Waits like What’s He Building, but
if David Lynch’s movies sound design works better for you as a reference, this
sounds good too. There’s also space for an organ drool that dramatizes the
feeling of the song. Làira is, instead, an heartbroken melody interspersed with
dense beats, one of the most rhythmic tracks of the album that at a certain
point opens to a beautiful and childish melody in the choruses.
Arca is almost an experimental version of
a gospel lullaby, with his guitar melodies that preludes to the more than ten
minutes long closing track A Te Sola, a piece of only acoustic guitar,
electronics and voice but for the final slightly noisy and subliminal part that
is the perfect ending for an highly emotional album. And if you’re curious
enough as me to see if live Daniela Pes is as enchanting and coherent as in
studio, I’ll leave you with this video taken from a concert here below. Ah, I
was just forgetting: this album was one of the best record issued in Italy last
year as far as many reviews and reviewers.
