Bark Psychosis
Hex

My thoughts are unemployed, like me; I let myself sink into the couch after yet another job interview ends with the usual phrase and the usual slimy handshake. I hear the thud of my shoes on the carpet: a dull sound. I throw my head back and look at the window upside down; through the small slats of the blinds, a stream of light pierces my pupils, and I feel them shrink, feel them defend themselves, as best they can, from those little solar daggers. I reach for the player; I already know what's inside: track three, quickly: I need to relax, I need to close my eyes and let myself be dominated by everything moving at this moment, alternately, in my brain. Let’s see if I can direct the traffic I have inside.

"Absent friend", 8 minutes and twenty seconds of closed eyes, of free diffusion of relaxation, of pure-state elegance, an ephemeral well-being built on baseless foundations. I bring myself to a state of suspension, and there is suspension throughout HEX: violins, double basses, vibraphone slung over piano carpets, guitars, trumpets, and sudden jazz bursts, surrounded by deviated and elongated notes, returning nervous and shortened as if nothing happened.

State of anxiety: although I'm dozing, I'm alert: there's always the feeling that something new and unexpected will intrude, suddenly, among the notes of this CD. Graham Sutton's "undertone" vibrates like the tail of a moth approaching, from the darkness from where it came, to the source of light and heat, and as it gets closer, its oscillation becomes more decisive, determined to enjoy that glow and energy even if only for a fragment of time interrupted by thuds, shots, spasmodic convulsions.

When "Fingerspit" begins, I hear the distant echo of a guitar, which gradually takes space in the surrounding area, the subdued jazz is a soul that chains itself within something else, something twisted, curved, that destabilizes me, yet it fits me comfortably; I recognize even from here, from this sort of peripheral sublimation, that the not-so-secret essence of all this is jazz. "Pendulum Man" closes this phobic album, at times manic, an album you play, and listen to entirely, attracted, almost hypnotized, by its obsessive forms.

I think that after all, these four guys are truly psychotic, psychotic in the art of sounds. I wake up from the catharsis, take the album cover, read something... a thought dedicated to someone, surely, which begins with the words "you stand apart with the sinking sunlight...", and I feel like it's me, the unknown recipient of this epitaph. The album, endowed with rare and unusual beauty, is from 1993.