Year 2012 had a slow start. We went sliding from one year to the next with almost empty hands–I said hands, not heads! I am back to listening to some more Summer Echoes in these days of January, and with great satisfaction. Far from summery visions, the good notes hold well even in the wintry hours of submerged shadows. Out of the window it’s pitch black, the world is still a dark place, but for the weirdest reasons dim lights are shining “on the good things” most of the time and, as we are drawn to them, we seem to be able yet again to forget about all the unmentionables that are permanently lurking behind rather undisturbed. Plunging into the quiet eccentricity of the album, I listen to the ticking away of pounding textures and uneven melodies. And there is something bizarrely singular and at times even spooky–almost a sinister playfulness–in the lyrics, that make them surface at the weirdest moments, that connects them even to the most mundane mental and physical processes. I found myself silently reciting lines from Rituals when tumbling down on the slippery street.
The previous year went by somewhat hurriedly and inconsequentially. It was, on many accounts, a most disastrous year. Look at what lies around you, a little beyond your threshold perhaps, to see what this means. As I had occasion to mention other times, observing the world from here everything looks like the dream of a madman. All the unceasing screaming, the crumbling down: I often feel with some remorse that the handful of people stranded on these coasts up in the North only get to sense the distant echoes of it all. There is just too much, too much choice, too much noise, too much despair, too much incommensurateness, too much of everything going on to focus on this or on that. We are all still perfecting our escapology act. Through our ears, too.
Yes, its always easy to slip away ,always easy try to look to another side, try to escape, think “This is not my business”….You can look at the stars all the time but, in the end, the rats are always there,saying : You have to paid “your” debts,you have to swallow all the injustice and despair in the name of the markets or in the name of Moodys or Standars & Poors.In the end , we, the “pigs”,we are only paying the price of our ” incontinence” and the disguisting corruption of our leaders…The same story again.And the worse is about to happen.In any case, you dont have to feel any kind of remorse in Iceland and in the North : its good to know that there are still some places, some islands, were the disaster,at least in theory,is only a distant echo.But here,in Spain, and in other places,the disaster is a day to day reality,you have to fight constantly against an atmosphere full of broken dreams and false promises of endless richness and endless prosperity.And good music ,good books,good movies ,the consolation of the art,is not enough.