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Rating: When you leave home cheerfully bloated at one in the morning, and wander through the alleys of the Gracia neighborhood in a conveniently confused state, finding yourself eventually in a crowded little square where on stage four over-forty men with receding hairlines, clad in yellow and blue superhero outfits under acid with fluttering capes, intent on squeezing out sounds unknown to this side of the galaxy from instruments such as - acoustic guitar with bicycle brakes mounted - charango painted in phosphorescent blue - toy keyboard with farm animal sounds - various and sundry, one can easily believe that what you are witnessing is actually a product of your own altered mind.
But that's not the case, because Don Simòn i Telefunken ("i" means "and" in Catalan) really do exist, they live among us, and in everyday life they are skillfully disguised as harmless neighbors who ask you for sugar on loan, as placid middle-aged men intent on choosing anchovies at the market, so they can continue their mission of mystic pied pipers of a cheerful regression of Humanity to a carefree dementia undisturbed.
And the vehicle of this return to the fetal state of consciousness is a music (music?) that sounds like a cross between The Boy Least Likely To and the melodies of early Atari video games: tinkling (yes: "tinkling" is the word) sounds, childish voices, verses and phrases repeated endlessly in a gigantic loop, little choruses and sketches of melodies here and there, as if four musically gifted impaired individuals were handed a collection of xylophones and little trumpets and then locked in a padded cell.
The Festa Mayor de Gracia attracts a lot of people every year for a week, and every evening in every square in the neighborhood high-level local rock and jazz bands perform. And this makes the impact of seeing an entire square, a demanding and sophisticated audience, completely subdued by these deadly lullabies even stronger. In fact, the entire concert (a good hour of music) consisted of the same song, or rather the same TWO chords which took on different forms each time, supported by different instrumentation, enriched here and there with halts and a cappella parts, occasionally pausing to give the time for the proponents of lobotomy to announce a new title, which systematically turned out to be made up of the same yet elusive musical dough. Still undecided, in my anxiety to catalog what I had in front of me, between "genius" and "dementia," titles like "The first one who comes makes breakfast" or "Reality isn't a nice place to be, but at this time it's the only one open" guided me towards the first hypothesis.
And remember not to double-park your mothership, otherwise the catamarans will scold you. The coat rack knows too much: it must be eliminated!
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