Alfa Mist
Antiphon

Imagine for a second being an engineering student behind schedule, grappling with the last exams of your master's and the beginning of your thesis, in a dark and damp room in the basement of an ancient villa in Cesena. You have all the comforts that Western society can offer you, but in a certain sense, life sucks. Even all the music you've listened to up to that moment sucks. The only things that make you happy are weed and sex, which only serves to heighten that deep sense of maladjustment and frustration that grips your soul. Your travel companions are anxiety, stress, and insomnia, coincidentally the same ones that accompanied Alfa Mist during the composition of Antiphon, whose tracks were mostly composed at night in an attempt to exorcise that invisible demon whose sole purpose is to keep you from sleeping.

Then it happens that the guys you play with let you hear some interesting stuff, you get into it, and you start listening to it on loop on a famous multimedia streaming platform. Then it happens that in the middle of a cold winter night, the algorithm of this famous platform spits out Antiphon. Until that moment, I had never been much inclined towards the jazz experiments of the new millennium, stubbornly continuing to revel in the old canons of that rock that I have always personally considered lost rather than dead. It only took the first thirty seconds of "Keep On" to sweep away all that had been my life (musical and otherwise) up to that moment, as if someone had finally pushed the reset button in my brain. Not to mention "Breathe", chiseled by the voice of Kaya Thomas-Dyke; a song of epiphany, in the Joycean sense of the term. "7th October" is then a track that makes you nod your head to the rhythm and excellently breaks the mood with its fresh hip-hop line. Another special mention goes to "Brian", a track that closes the album and very often Alfa Mist's live performances, a true game capable of drawing a smile on anyone's face.

I like to think that Antiphon was conceived as a medicine for those who feel lost, incomplete, and misunderstood, steeped as it is in spirituality and introspection.