Enter The Worship Circle
Chair And Microphone Vol. 1

It seems like it will never stop, this rain.

This is not the rain that "whispered warm and fleeting". No, absolutely not. It's bad rain, slipping over you, leaving you with nothing but the damp you'd like to dry immediately. I drag myself to the door of the house feeling my legs almost rebelling, I collapse on the bed pulling off the covers, angry.

I know this feeling well. "Darkness fell over the entire land". Muscles stiffen, the mind is alert, too alert, while you'd just want to sleep and you can never succeed. So you seek that feverish twilight, you close your eyes in your artificial slumber that you bought cheap from the pharmacist. That drugged and paid-for sleep at the doorsteps of a late afternoon, when you'd just like to become a drop of rain too. And slip away, forgotten. Maybe just to die at the roots of a flower to give it life again. A sleep that for some reason then populates itself with a strange and unsettling musical puzzle. Johnny Cash singing "Thirteen", the guy on the corner strumming "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" gathering coins, the neighbor blasting a rap, Bonnie "Prince" Billy whispering in the mind "I know nothin' and I am overjoyed". No, I don't want to know anymore either. I don't want to know anymore. I want to be a raindrop and evaporate at the first sun, return to the sky and fly like a cirrus. I wish to be without a body that now burns with fever, without consuming itself as I would like. "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" M'gethsemane. Where are you God?

I put on the crackling speakers of the laptop this "Chair and Microphone Vol. 1" by "Enter The Worship Circle". I remember very well when someone, a few months ago, told me about it. "Never heard of them", I replied. "Well, listen, maybe they are a bit of scout songs, I like them... They always talk about God, a bit fanatic, for those who maybe don't believe like them, but they're not bad". And then they added: "You know Deicide? Well, they're simply the opposite...". No, I don't know Deicide, but it's the same - I tell myself. I will listen to it.

Simple album, this, for me who is looking for God today. Heartfelt prayers, sincere in this album. The enthusiasm is genuine, and you can feel it. It's an album with little, almost spartan. Just "Chair and Microphone". And on the chair sits Ben Pasley, and the microphone captures his youthful, robust and somewhat naive voice. And then there is his guitar. They make "Christian Folk", or something like that. And today I'm looking for God, in this album, I am looking for God among the dust, in these notes, because "For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost" (Lk. 19, 10). "One, two..." thus begins "Chair and Microphone". Words that introduce the opener "Pieces", with its long and heartfelt: "I’m falling to pieces" with that "faaaaaaaaaalling" dragged out, giving the sense of falling, of suspension in a void inside, and which sounds nonetheless deeply and incurably hopeful. A track that moves, ultimately, in what now in my anger seems just naivety.

God is dead, someone said, and sometimes I wish I were instead of him. The cold rain fever grips me. But the heartfelt "Rescue Me Deep" is a balm, another track where Pasley seems almost like a Lazarus resurrected by a divine jolt from the mists of reality to the hyperuranian paradise of dream, of non-reality 'And now when I dream, I dream of You, You, God And how Forever might really feel' Instead, other terrifying images crowd my dream, while the music flows, my blood mixes with the fever, heat spreads on my forehead and my skin rebels in a malignant and bastard allergy that makes me scratch almost to the point of flaying myself and bleeding. Who knows why while I listen to Pasley praising God's glory in "Crown Him", I feel "Eaten from The Inside", torn inside, split in two by an allergy that devours and sucks me in, slowly imploding. A soul tearing apart. Love and Sleep, Glory and Ashes, while Pasley sings triumphantly over his acoustic riffs 'Crown Him Love, crown Him Alive and Well, Crown Him God of Our Salvation Crown Him Lovely, crown Him Beautiful, He is God and we adore Him'.

There are songs that don't mean much, in this album. Songs that are fluff like certain sermons full of rhetoric and certain orators stuffed with emptiness. "How Precious To Me" is an ill-suited lullaby, and "Wedding Days" sounds like a filler of nothingness, an insipid pastry with nothing inside. But there is the raging precariousness of "Hurricane" and especially there is the splendid "Memphis" which from the height of its major and syncopated tone sings 'If I am rich, if I am strong If I am lonely, if I am wrong One thing is sure I’m going downtown down to my grave If I am black, if I am kind If I am angry, if I am blind One thing is sure I’m going downtown down to my grave' "Sicur l'è mort", they say around here, "Sure he is dead".

But at this moment I am sure of few things. And that's why I believe I am still alive.