Jamie Woon
Mirrorwriting

Nowadays, charts, playlists, various online music stores, and the most colorful tabloids are of little use to showcase all the commotion of artists and singers in circulation, and commercial-mainstream media cannot even cover a small part of it. It happens, therefore, that a wave of quality, exquisiteness, and passion remains confined in dusty corners and lost web pages and is unable to compete with the mainstream-commercial mob that, amidst gossip, hits, and eccentricities, dominates the media. However, alongside blogs and individual/niche/alternative sites, there is the primary tool for searching for precious truffles and golden musical nuggets buried in the corners of the global stage, namely, Wikipedia. A click on the genre, a mouse maneuver over the artist category, a touch on the page that correlates artists, albums, and the chosen genre presents you with a list of results to get lost in virtual schizophrenia. Call it cheap naivety, worthless effortlessness, a mild trick to avoid venturing into the intricate web jungle, but the king of kings of the Wiki has allowed me (and probably not just me) to discover a great number of artists, singers, bands, albums, singles, and previously ignored biographies, as well as ensured a considerable enrichment of my cultural-media baggage.

In the heart of Wikipedia (strictly in the English version, richer, more substantial, and detailed compared to Italian), rummaging through the electronic-synth pop section, I came across this Jamie Woon, English, class of '83. Aside from discovering that he was (and I think still is) male (the average Debaser reader will indeed understand my tendency to favor the female branch of musical entertainment), the proposal of the aforementioned, Mirrorwriting, turned out to be an excellent product, as well as a positive discovery. Released in 2001, Mirrorwriting is a rather atypical album compared to the current dance scenario where euphoria, syncopated rhythm, and heavy bass are "de rigueur"; halfway between the warmth of R&B, the sweetness (a bit savory) of not overly sugary pop ballads, the freshness of downtempo, synth distortion, and the diaphanous atmosphere of mystery and enigma of the ambient/new age context, the album gets lost in dreamy, relaxed, calm, and a touch of dark sounds, a handful of tracks specifically composed for the temporary relaxation of the senses and the process of rearranging bodily-mental turmoil after an intense day of study or work.

The perfect realization of the sound philosophy of "Relax, Take it Easy" starts with the tribal-hip hop infusion of Night Air and with the ambient-trip hop relaxation of Street, just before delving into the dreamy Spiral and the semi-unplugged Waterfront. Equally aligned are the soul-R&B of the "complaining" Lady Luck, the horrific dark background of Spirits, the new age fluidity of the unsettling Gravity and the timid funky-gospel hints à la Tracy Chapman in Middle.

Spirituality, tranquility, relaxation, and unwinding are entities that nowadays the music industry seems to have relegated to the background, too focused on the upheaval of hearing and the discographic standardization that results from it. Works like this Mirrorwriting - partly comparable with the recent Channel Orange by Frank Ocean, which also had a good sales response in the aberrant States - struggle to impose themselves on the market and on the mass's devices, now unable to adequately fragment the attribution of value and quality to the products offered to them. Yet there's Wikipedia. There are niche blogs, alternative pages, "underground" digressions, spaces for variety and complexity. Just one more click, a click made with more accuracy and interest, and worlds, landscapes, suggestions, moods, noises, tones, hues, sounds, and emotions open, the "other" par excellence.

Jamie Woon, Mirrorwriting

Night Air - Street - Lady Luck - Shoulda - Middle - Spirits - Echoes - Spiral - TMRW - Secondbreath - Gravity - Waterfront.