Anekdoten
Until All the Ghosts Are Gone

The light is fading. Colors fade and lose their boundaries.

Like drifting thoughts that wear out day by day.

We are confined to our dens, waiting for a message from who knows who or what.

A message of liberation from this forced prison, which we can't get used to.

Accustomed as we are to satisfying every sort of need or presumed such.

To a life so indulgent in its fiction, where the self is only what we choose to see, where everything runs and nothing flows. How was it said? "Produce, consume, die."

The virus is yet another crazy variable, sweeping away our sandcastles and reminding us once again how powerless we are in front of the Spectacle of Creation.

Perhaps we didn't even imagine ourselves experiencing fear of our own breaths. Of hugs, kisses, handshakes. Of those few gestures that still make us feel alive.

We dig furrows to bury our humanity even deeper.

But in the end, it's just a new daily routine to submit to, while life redistributes within itself the relative weight of things.

It is on days like these that the music of Anekdoten sounds even darker and more claustrophobic. It's the sound of things that won't return. Yet it is precisely what I want to hear at this moment.

An instrumental fierceness made of compound times and dissonances, nervous guitars like the times we live in, with the mellotron always present to paint frescoes of inexorable beauty.

At times the storm gives way to calm, and we find ourselves suspended in dreamlike landscapes reminiscent of Floydian psychedelia, where the flute or cello, sax or vibraphone take turns, giving the atmospheres a certain mystical aura.

And fundamentally, what fascinates me about them is this soul constantly balancing between sonic harshness and alluring visions, like opposing poles that interpenetrate, like Yin and Yang.

What remains to be said that hasn't already been said before? Well, for instance, that on the album in question there are illustrious guests: Per Wiberg (former keyboardist of Opeth), the wind player Theo Travis (already at the service of Steven Wilson and King Crimson), and guitarist Marty Wilson-Piper (The Church and All About Eve).

But Anekdoten, at heart, are always the same, despite the passing years and long compositional pauses, they have added or removed elements from their progressive rock, but the formula is always recognizable, a load of electric tensions and that congenital Scandinavian melancholy.

Will we remain the same when all this is over? Or will we let ourselves be swallowed as usual by everyday life, by the consumerist monster we've created, and the frenzy of modern living? Will we return to those egotistic bastards we've always been?

Anyway, if you have nothing better to do these days, as I believe, stay at home and give a listen to this great album.

Until all the ghosts are gone.