Review of Lua [12k3018]

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I have never experienced a general anesthetic. Fortunately. The people who tried such an experience described the awakening after that induced sleep as a state of mind between a vague sense of shock and an ecstatic feeble-mindedness, where the surrounding entities seems like coming from a kind of muffled wonderland, where nurses could look like smiling seraphic beings, and the surgeon takes the semblance of a gingerbread man. I recalled the seemingly enjoyable pleasures of numbing anesthetic, as the sparkle for this release by Will Samson (British composer and singer, known for a style combining lovely simple melodies, folk-like ballads and a way of singing that could resemble what a friend of mine labels as “post-castration style” such as the one by Bon Iver or Sigur Ros’ Jonsi) was an accident occurring while he was relocating from the UK to Portugal, a traumatic injury to his mouth and teeth that forced him to drop the use of voice. I’m not sure he needed general anesthetic but I guess that during what he defined as “the surreal 48 hours in a Portuguese hospital bed” following that injury, some pitiful nurse should have given him some strong painkillers and they could have inspired the compositional process that let the sound flow like a leather in the air. According to Samson own words: “The whole process was about being open and allowing the music to flow out naturally, without letting my analytical mind become involved. To just press record on my tape machines and see what happens. This experiment allowed me to produce some honest documents of how I was really feeling at the time with all that was going on in my life. “Père” was recorded the day after returning home from hospital, with my friend Beatrijs De Klerck adding her violin parts a week or so later.”. Besides the track mentioned by the author’s memories, this brief release includes other four tracks: the opening “Antepassado” activated an old musical memory for some strange reason (“Tundra”, a track signed by Patternclear, a relatively old tricephalic project by Kim Cascone, Don Falcone and Paul Neyrinck), while “You Are An Ocean”, the lovely track that got co-signed by Benoit Pioulard, evoked the impressive clip for Samson’s “Sanctuary”. The delicate crystalline bells of “Electric Parade” and the gently burnt granules over a bright symphony, fed by strings and pad, of “Lua,” perfectly render that blissful dazedness I described at the beginning of this introduction. The delicacy of this digital release could easily explain the reason why some cartoons feature flying and tweeting orbiting birds after a character experience a thunderous blow to the head!

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