David Cain
The Seasons

Well, look how things turn out!!! You make a little record that no one pays any attention to, and after forty years you find it fetching crazy prices on eBay.

Not only that, you're also constantly besieged by a trail of strange individuals, people who babble about obscure beauty, pagan undertones, about the evocative embrace of ancient and modern.

Complete and utter nerds with hypersensitive antennas suited for catching a thousand possible madeleines, one of which is obviously you.

Nice people, mind you, maybe just a little too caught up with ghosts. In any case, all this attention doesn't really bother you, even if, being a good Englishman, you maintain a certain understatement.

Tell us, Mr. Cain, how did all this dark beauty come to you? Well, it just came to me. And that business about paganism? What can I say, there were a lot of pagans back then, you should have seen the coats we wore around.

At that time, you were working at the BBC, doing soundtracks and sound effects for radio dramas, and it was the period of the “Drama workshops,” a series of broadcasts for schools.

The purpose? To stimulate in the youngsters “dramatic dance, movement, mime, speech, character and situation improvisation.”

“There would be a bit of poetry to set to music from this guy, about the seasons,” those were the words of your irascible boss. Just another job.

The radio broadcast airs, and after a while, the record comes out. Being educational material, the only thing that happens is that a few copies end up in the schools that request it.

So, in some dining hall at some English school, there are the kids in shorts who, amid heavy kitchen fumes, improvise dances to somewhat bizarre music...

If only it were just the music!!!

What about that voice that, paternalistic and strangely neutral, declaims things a bit out of the ordinary?

“Like severed hands, wet leaves lie flat on the deserted avenue. Houses like skulls look through neglected windows. A woman dressed like a crumpled umbrella, her mouth opening and closing with a zipper, leaves number 53 to send a letter. Her gloved hand hesitates, then knowing there will be no response, she rips it up and throws it in the gutter. And autumn with its tail of pheasants comforts her with chrysanthemums.”

Well, I don't know about you, but these kids dancing poetry on a dark beauty carpet remind me of Wes Anderson and his whimsical and suspended grammar where the bizarre naturally replaces the usual.

The “Drama workshop” project also included post-listening activities: music, painting, written work... And I swear I would pay money to see that material...

But how is the record? “Earthy,” as one of those complete and utter nerds asks our David? Damn, I think “earthy” is the right term. David loses his understatement and almost gets enthusiastic: “Yes, yes, the seasons are the earth!!! So I tried to create a musical environment that would evoke this concept.”

However, just to give you an idea, imagine something very weird folk, subtly mysterious folk cadences, marching tunes from other eras rendered by a kind of naive electronics...

TV themes for imaginative children served on a million little oddities...

And anyway, dear David, all those people babbling about obscure beauty, pagan undertones, about the evocative embrace of ancient and modern, weren't entirely wrong.

Trallallà...