Hypnos 69
The Eclectic Measure

There aren't many albums that can convey such melancholy to me.

It's not just a matter of harmonic choices, scales, sounds. It's something more intimate, intrinsic. Like a liquid permeating a fabric, saturating its fibers, filling the empty spaces between warp and weft. Something that, just like a liquid, in a sort of cruel osmotic process, seems to pass from the music to those who listen to it.

"The Eclectic Measure" ('06) was supposed to be Hypnos 69's final album. Even before the recording of the album was finished, the band had announced the end of their journey, the conclusion of a story that began more than ten years ago, which led four guys from Diest (Belgium) to share stages with the likes of Brant Bjork and Alfredo Hernandez.

Only in this way, perhaps, with the resigned awareness that accompanies the writing of an epilogue, can one explain where that melancholy comes from, which seems to pervade even the most intense moments of the album, that sadness, that sense of "definitiveness" that accompanies its listening.

"The Eclectic Measure", for Hypnos 69, represents what is commonly defined as "the album of maturity": the stoner sounds that still made an appearance in previous productions dissolve completely, leaving the field clear for sound coordinates that have their roots in vintage progressive, but to absorb its sounds and taste, more than its structures. Songs mostly short, with a remarkable accessibility and immediacy, where the song form is diluted by instrumental digressions, without, however, indulging in sterile virtuosity, in onanistic exercises in style.

It is an album that, like an oil painting, benefits from multiple layers, contrasting melodic lines, colors, and sonic materials that blend and mix without clashing, fading into one another. Hard rock rhythms of seventies origin that slowly languish on velvety carpets of Hammond and Fender Rhodes. Hysterical, nervous sax lines that perhaps too closely recall Frippian neurosis ("Ominous - But Fooled Before"), marry acoustic ballads of disarming simplicity, where the brass can rest in soft coils ("My Ambiguity Of Reality"). Shamelessly Floydian atmospheres, of whispered sadness, that gain strength in emphatic orchestral crescendos (the moving closing track "Deus Ex Machina"). Hard rock, folk, progressive, a touch of psychedelia, even some passages that seem to coax the lips to pronounce the name of Motorpsycho ("Halfway To The Stars"), willingly lose their identity to mix, merge, and blur.

A sad and beautiful album that perhaps can be blamed for revealing its secrets too easily, for not having the modesty to reveal its origins, its sources of inspiration.

In recent months, the band has resumed live activity and announced that, by the summer of 2008, they will return to the studio to record a new album.

It was supposed to be the end of the journey. I'm happy it was just a brief stop.