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Rating: After detonating the device loaded with psychic shrapnel of "The washing line," Humpty Dumpty engages in the silence of everyday life. Three years pass between the last anarcho/recording on a Fostex four-track and the installation of a PC software multitrack.
Meanwhile, a lot of river water has passed under the fragile bridge of perception: Humpty immerses himself in meditation and, starting from the psychedelic analgesia of Donovan's “Hurdy gurdy man,” he slides ever closer to Indian Raga, Taoism, and Sufism in search of a spiritual detachment from a reality perceived as disharmonious.
Strengthened by liberation from the hiss, the rebellious margin of the sound matter's malleability, Humpty now seems intent on tapping into the motionless center of movement.
Where the noisy excitement of the previous work made use of methodic overlapping, "River Flows" operates cuts on an already harmonically essential fabric, allowing the remaining sound to vaporize amidst distant drones and reverberations.
Here, the slender melodic thread struggles to reach any song-like completion and lingers among intangible cirrus clouds and a faded rainbow of colors.
An album of great airiness with an essentially pop soul equates to a photographic overexposure: the light spreads liquidly between the guitar strings and the listening, and the impression is of crossing a light and dreamy mist from which pastoral folk sketches occasionally materialize (“Who goes amid the green wood” from Joyce), minimal electric mantra rides (“River Flows”), quirky nursery rhymes (“Take the trash out”), mesmerizing songs for guitar, voice, and panning (“Love came to us”), and placed in the closure, the dark night raga of “Shell of night.”
Net of some naiveté and the poor sound quality (which also constitutes a good part of its charm), “River flows” is a formally accomplished and seductive album.
Rarely has inexperience achieved such clarity.
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