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Rating: A PERFECT MEETING
Sometimes it happens. Days are crossed by swarms of music, buzzing incessantly between the walls and the days we inhabit, each one erasing the echo of the other. The horn of plenty of the future, present and available, incessantly pours forth an incorporeal harvest of every blessing: a brief wait and the magic comes true, with the tiny appearance of an icon placed on the luminous desert of a monitor. I am old enough to enjoy the repeated amazement, like any Buendía in front of the spectacle of ice. And I am an omnivore, always accustomed to listening to the possibility of a meeting. But the omnivore is often compulsive, indigestion more of a routine than an incident. The silence, therefore, sounds like medication, a fast that purifies.
In this silence, in the expanded space that makes sound shine, listening becomes deep, breath. In this silence, which I created after yet another sound saturation, the rustling voice of a man appeared two days ago. Delivered from the past, broadcasted in my lair by the humble technology that suits it. Funny that it is precisely the incomprehensible wonders of the present future that put you in contact with memory... The man is a negro (for that was the reality, despite the ill-fated worshippers of political correctness) I'm told he's blond, small, a rascal. The voice is open, powerful, alive. And it immediately enters the bloodstream, takes possession of the inner space, armed with the disarming power of simplicity. And it sweeps away, for the time you allow it, the corruption of sound as an edible product, as coded subculture in genres, the poverty of seemingly infinite possibilities. It erases the unerasable distance marked by time and delivers to me a present that adheres to mine: it offers me a chair, at a somewhat grimy table, in a crowded, smoky place. And, for the time it grants me, it dries and digs me out, it caresses me and reminds me who I was, who I am. A very pale negro who never had his blues, a ghost of myself, anesthetized by the abuse of removal, adapted to his time.
I read that some consider him the founder of Delta Blues, that he also played with Son House (another voice that came to visit me, many years ago, and sometimes reappears in the lair), that he is probably the first to have recorded a blues, that his hands struck the guitar body and did not disdain putting on a show, playing the guitar behind his head... But the cornucopia is so generous that it will be enough for you to type his name, Charlie Patton, to find pages that speak of him, it is worth it. I found some boards, inscribed with the bold and luminous and dark strokes of Robert Crumb, which seem to adhere with vital simplicity to the voice I am listening to, narrating about it much more than words can; you can look at them here.
Sometimes it happens. It's not uncommon that, in search of a sonic detox, I look towards the past, at the spines of blues records and at the end of a time tunnel that transports me to an elsewhere never so close. This time it was a perfect meeting. The same I wish for you.
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