Ed Alleyne-Johnson
Ultraviolet

A person I know says that having lunch at a restaurant, seated, trapped by the sparkle of cutlery, induces impressions of this kind. I mean, feeling square. Schematic. Rational. You feel responsible by force. You understand that it's all about taking a few steps, that it's all about how is your lady?, that the meaning is all in a coffee grabbed on the go, before catching a train, and not just any train. That one. To go there. To do something else in turn. Life is a concatenation of obligatory events, happiness a Christmas bonus.

I wanted to write this one well. A nice explanatory review. I had imagined it something like this:

"Ed Alleyne-Johnson, formerly of the New Model Army, a unique and electric violinist with a high-sounding name, looking first like a scorned punk and later like a weathered metal veteran. He roams the streets of Albion, playing in the squares as a busker with the help of an endless series of loops and pedals. He comes out in '94 - before getting lost in his slick repertoire of violin covers of famous tracks, mostly played on the street - with a nice instrumental disc titled not very imaginatively "Ultraviolet". The track names correspond to the colors of the rainbow. The whole is very nice and vaguely new age. Even if it can tire, since the rounds on which the compositions are based are more or less always the same. On the whole, however, the work listens well, thanks to the effects and even gaudy distortions that our performer sometimes uses, and the loops and pizzicatos with which he compensates for the shortcomings of an instrument normally solo, but with many unexpressed potentialities (without wanting to go postmodern, some had already been pulled out by a certain Niccolò, who obviously didn't have the right jack to plug it into a distortion box. You know, those male-female problems...). The album, as any reader with a minimum of inner life will have already grasped, is entirely focused on the violin-instrument, and exclusively composed of violin overlaps that our performer excellently recreates live thanks to the aforementioned equipment. Sometimes even changing the structure of the compositions, which thus reveal themselves as little more than frameworks. However, the whole does not conceal any real study of the hidden potential of the instrument, nor particularly daring experiments. Ed is neither crazy nor a genius.

The album's only particular feature is the overall sound, the mood, the idea, tackled with a force of phrases sometimes more vaguely Celtic (with an equally vaguely Arabic aftertaste, at times) than properly classical. Until old Ed is convinced he's holding an electric guitar, and there come unique outpourings that might perhaps stand better with a drum underneath.
Overall, a pleasant album with some evocative ambitions, which is certainly worth a 3.5."

There, like that. Academic data just enough, technical notions just enough, a pinch of acidity that always makes a bit of a frustrated critic à la Scaruffi, yet at least there's also a bit of irony to ease it. It intrigues, informs, criticizes, doesn't go too far, gives illusory appearances of objectivity.

Then I reread myself, and it's not me. I listen to it again, and the album is not it. No, it can't be that I wrote this.
What I listen to is something else altogether, compared to what I wrote. It's a memory taking shape, in the only moment it can do so before returning to being what it is (and who knows, I don't, what it is: fog, already lived, already seen, maybe nothing). It's a world with vague and shaded contours, but at the same time concluded, self-sufficient, parallel, disorienting. It's unfathomable music, that you would see as the backdrop of a REM phase ended particularly far off.
I like to jump from color to color, without a precise order. It's like maneuvering mood changes. Yellow particularly grabs me; I don't know what kind of symbolism to find there, and I'm not even interested. Orange goes through me, enigmatic. Red is distressing; blue, don't even talk about it. Toward the end, the music is the skeleton of itself, and it tinkles like an xylophone of bones. After a while, you can't even distinguish the emotional flows from one another anymore. This is because the notes, in passing, always leave a trail of themselves as if they don't want to resign themselves to their moment of evidence to the ear. As if they were seeking immortality, fading but without hurry, mingling with the more alive and present ones, filling the listening cave with echoes.

I don't want to leave it, and I often go back to it. When I have no footholds when I have no imagination. Sometimes I listen to it around six in the afternoon on dull days with no way out: it's not day, it's not evening, and it's not sunset, and you feel lost, so that's fine. It's an album to which, despite the track names, you can't give a precise color, if not some absurd shade in balance. But perhaps they are not things you can think of sharing. Maybe it's a matter of being alone with those incommunicable things, and that's it.

It's that I only have impressions left. The rest escapes me. It's that I just can't manage to live on anything else.

Screw restaurants.