Fishmans
Long Season

At the sound of the alarm, I rise gladly, as I was just pretending with my eyes closed. Outside the terrace, the sky is its usual blue. I shift my view to a neighbor stretching on his balcony wearing only boxers. His no longer young body covered in bristling hairs. The gray chromatic scale of TV antennas accompanied my panorama downward, and I wonder if this neighborhood figure is an extension of the metal protrusions, if he seeks to capture the morning awe frequencies like myself, to project himself towards the blue to seem less like a man in gray, one of those sung by Ray Davies.

I preset the alarm yet every evening I check, in case I indulge in the thrill of changing digits. The location, however, cannot be set; you are forced to get up in the same place, with the same face to boot. So before going to bed, since time to listen to a record needs to be maximized, I decide the destination. This way, I wake with a semblance of elsewhere left by the music. Lately, my guiding spirit is a lack thereof.

Upon closer look, the neighbor seems to have almond-shaped eyes.

Sure, last night I listened to the longest song I've ever heard, and it comes from Japan, more precisely from Waikiki Beach, not the beach, but a recording studio in Tokyo. 36 minutes in which a musical motif organically takes shape, a jam suspended on a thin thread whose integrity is never called into question. The quality of this work is its compactness despite evoking dreamlike atmospheres, a lucid dream that requires no further abstraction given the language barrier. I believe interpretation plays an even more important role in such cases. What to hear in composer Shinji Sato's voice is a personal task; for instance, I perceive despair and kindness.

Shinji passed away at the age of 33 and doesn't know that his creation gained popularity among the younger generations. Not before saying goodbye in the best way to his listeners, with a nice live performance from December '98 which includes the same Long Season in its entirety. The voice is the album's detonating fuse: within it coexist sensitivity and intensity, the whisper and the cry of pain. In some passages, it seems to expand the martial nature of the rhythm section with its feminine timbre. Even the main melody is devoid of footholds, a crossroads between dub emphasis and the melancholic reflection of electronically declined slowcore. There's the part with the percussion solo that alone is worth the ticket. And then, the producer's name is ZAK.

I like to think that Long Season relaxes like a cooldown after a long run. The feeling remains one of an apparent calm since we still have a great sense of urgency about us. A friend recommended the record describing it more or less like this: "it well represents the nineties, the beautiful things of that period." I don't know if he's right, but he's not wrong; often, it's impossible to explain music in words; perhaps his phrase is the best review.