Breathless
The Glass Bead Game

The new wave of the eighties. No genre has ever been so promiscuous, consolidating and blending in the shared experiences of the emerging bands refining their sound under this new banner. After all, if the label was born solely to categorize all productions that saw the light during that particular period, no further words are needed to justify this potpourri of sounds. Yet, despite the countless influences, musical backgrounds at the antipodes (Talking Heads and Cure, just to name two), an invisible, thin common thread aligned all entities within the genre. Seemingly unrelated subjects, different physiognomies, but genetic biosynthesis born of the same DNA. A journey through the ebbs and flows of a movement that has reinvented and nurtured itself with new energy at regular intervals, even today with nostalgic revivals, always and in any case faithful to the verb of the past.

Breathless are rightfully among the thousand souls of the new wave. Far from conventional rock, they took their first steps into dark lands like most bands of that time, but in their own way, with an originality and freshness of sounds that over time became the writings of their identity card. In some chapters, venturing into a sort of neo-psychedelia free from the genre's canonical virtuosity, "The Glass Bead Game (Tenor Vossa, 1986) is a lethal embrace, a mysterious, non-substantial matter that engulfs and drags the listener, track by track, into the impenetrable recesses of the psyche. A kaleidoscope of sounds and nuances married to the most uncompromising monochromatic trend of the era, Waters having "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun" rearranged by producers and sound engineers from Beggars Banquet or 4AD, the ideal soundtrack for a dinner between the more experimental Can and Ian Curtis with the right moon.

This short circuit has birthed psychedelic journeys at the end of the material night ("Across The Water"), poignant ballads intertwined in an arabesque of searing guitars ("All My Eye & Betty Martin"), obsessive litanies ("Monkey Talk"), tribal dances caught in the glow of fires that stain the darkness with shy dissolving lights ("Every Road Leads Home"), the hypnotic funk of "Sense of Purpose" (how much influence on Warpaint shines through this track) and, lastly, the mystical "Stone Harvest".

In their debut album, Breathless wanted to offer a new, very personal and original interpretation of the new wave, an alternative syntax enriched by the psychedelic component but devoid of pleonastic captions, concrete and pragmatic, akin to a thousand other sounds yet unlike any.