Goldfrapp
Felt Mountain

Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory are a couple of talented musicians and... nymphomaniacs. Their typical day goes something like this: wake up at half-past eleven in the morning when the sun's shadow is too weak to cover their sleep. Breakfast with cherry jam and honey butter, then he sees her all smeared with jam and they make love for the first time in the morning. Then down to the bungalow lost in the fields, playing moog and piano until late at night, sampling Barry and loving each other orally with Morricone playing in the background. They have everything they need, thanks also to his father's inheritance. In the evening, they play together, him on the piano and her with her splendid silver-slut voice, in the most compromising bars of the Bristol Veneer Surface in da Black.

But one day, the sweet harmonic movement of their placid life gets a jolt. "But do you love me?" Alison asks, almost panting while they are screwing above his DJ station. "I don't know, I really don't know, actually... yes, maybe. But tell me, oh muse, how can I prove it to you?" Then Alison, with her siren voice and lynx body, whispers in his left ear: "Write. Write me a record, for me, for my voice, for my sexual desire. If you are up to it, you will also be able to love me." So she gently moves away from his body and gets dressed, then smokes a menthol cigarette and, looking at him with a disarming coldness in her eyes: "No more sex until you make my record." A few months later "Felt Mountain" is born. A record in search of lost passion, in which Gregory attempts to describe that cold look he saw in her eyes. And then Alison snow eyes: all a startle, and her voice is blood mist, and his Nino Rota-like strings are male fire, and she howls with the help of the vocoder and he modulates the vocoder while sipping a frequency analyzer. They seem like an even sicker version of Portishead, but it's all a trip. "There's no damn hip-hop, love," she chirps, squeezing his neck with her hands.

And "Lovely head," like all the songs on the record, is born this way. He enters the bungalow at 3 am with a lit cigar, starts whistling as if he were on the set of "A Fistful of Dollars," handling those ancient analog synths of strings, then she enters completely naked and sings in front of the microphone in the throes of an agonizing crisis of physical love. Then Gregory, overcome with desire, prostrates himself, violet in the face, over a digital harpsichord and plays his canon in G minor, exhausted from desire. Meanwhile, Alison weaves allusive, suffering lyrics, writes words for the sake of alliteration, sexual verses that she then screams softly, more anguished than Fiona Apple, like on "Paper bag" (which she pronounces "peipappep"), and she always looks at him naked from the back of the bungalow). Months of electronic trip, noir, a bit sadistic, and a bit masochistic. But Will Gregory Peck does not stop and composes with the skeleton of a jazz devoured by years and smoke, like "Horse tears," which Alison dedicates to him who now cries with desire, like a horse. Her voice calling him scornfully: "lalalalalalà, lalalà... lalà!" like in the soundtrack of Rosemary's Baby, but more ambient, more electro, and she increasingly slutty.

When the record is finally finished, he, now dripping with sweat, hands it over to her and the music world (in the year of our Lord, 2000), after a certainly meticulous mixing. She looks at the record, then looks at him, kisses his chin fervently, and leaves satisfied. The following year it will be sex, cherry jam on nipples, concerts, orchestras, voluptuous BMW commercials, and the spell will last forever, at least until they feel like making another record. But the same spell will never be repeated again, and I am referring to the two shitty albums they made afterward. Because by then the passion is gone, and only the desire to screw remains.