John Foxx and the Maths
Howl

"What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?"

- Allen Ginsberg, Howl (1956) -

Suspended among my thoughts, in a thicket of sensations and emotions, memories of a time intertwined ever more with the gentle breath of my hourglass, which slowly marked my last steps.

The present and the past, under that tickling shower, listening to a track that perfumed my skin with "Scary Monsters," became a single, indecipherable, and twisted groove, nautical rope tickled by a warm breeze from the southwest.

Out of the shower, finally a rational thought amidst so much existential and temporal confusion; but that track... no, it wasn't by Bowie, it couldn't be Him.

A moment after my fleeting image played with a mirror, I thought, but what could be the true identity of the present, that is, when we think of the present as what should be, it has not yet manifested; when we think of it as existing, it is already past.

Is the present, perhaps, Dual?

But if that track wasn't by Bowie... whose Was it…

Could it perhaps be the work of that disobedient Dennis, yes Dennis Leigh.

But then this present, but does it really exist, I wonder.

And I'm not referring to time, strictly musical, which for myself, has been resting in peace and harmony at Père Lachaise for decades. If I had to think about the present truly lived by my consciousness, I would conclude that it consists of the immediate past. In that frame, composed of millions of microscopic snapshots, in that fraction of a second, where the perception of the present as instantaneous as it might be, would be merely the synthesis of an incalculable multitude of remembered and lost elements, infinite fragments of a life lived a moment before. What then would the pure present be, if not an abstraction, a byproduct of cultural marketing, an inducer of needs and consumption considered extensive but in reality already surpassed by a distant spirituality, a great illusion (modern): every perception, from the moment it is manifested, is already memory, in reality, we perceive only the past and its mathematical sequences.

Who knows where this flying disc of "Howl", the latest work of John Foxx and The Maths, emerged from which space-time window.

Dennis has always had a weakness for genius and eccentric personalities, like Connie Plank, his producer in the 70s, like Ben Edwards, his beloved and current Electronic Performer.

Surely inDennis's introspective journey,genetically initiated with "Metamatic"thirtyyears ago, tomorrow had already been traced,the cohesion of the melancholy of the near future with the icy man-machine interfaces and the aesthetic of the music remake/remodeling,so dear to Brian Eno,betrayed,in a carnal desire,precisely the ballardian perspective of thedecayingmetropolises, ofchaotic(random)sex,cities invaded by the machine civilization.

The impression is instead that the coordinates of the present, in "Owl" are deviant, without direction and path; imbued with an intrinsic and proto/post-punk anger.

The artist struggles to recognize himself, among the classic ruins of the metropolis, torn apart by the ostentation of machines, he struggles to find the radical artistic cultures of his youth, in the Era of Digital Austerity.

The London of the young John Foxx lived off pre-punk moans at the Marquee Club with his first creation, the Tiger Lily.

The Ville, not yet City, was fertile ground for liaisons, embraces, "correspondances"; all that soup that makes modernism.

Now digital sin is the only fertile ground for that little, of that modernism, that remains.

In "Owl" a time instead when art bloomed directly from the heights of literary and musical culture, from hugs and shoves under a scorching stage, is mystified.

Immersed in his shadow, Dennis, with his faithful knights, with his inseparable vocoder VP 330, disarmed by the years that have vanished like ghosts, cries out to his people to implore the advent of a new Avant-garde.

Or maybe, simply, just the return of Top Of The Pops. Perhaps.

Among the most beautiful tracks.

New York Times is the Big Apple seen in a frame, from the blurred images of Rosie and Miss Rayon to the current ones, with the ghost of Sister Ray in the shadows that the Velvet had left behind.

What is the present of that city, the N.Y.C. of '77, with the Bronx on fire, the police with machine guns on the trains, garbage piled up on the streets.

Or London of the '80s when characters like Steve Strange were at the forefront, The Fall churned out albums like Battenberg cakes, and the Acid Invasion landed from Detroit.

There are periods of almost universal chaos in which things that hold value are overturned and repudiated. These periods, throughout history, repeat themselves.

Perhaps it is there that we all are now, at the beginning of a new cycle.

In the album's Title track, "Howl" Robin Simon reverberates his "System of Romance", with a "Magazine" style guitar use, in perfect symbiosis with electronic sound passages, a forest of sound where boundaries are not defined and limits are otherwise unlimited.

Here the punk matrix of the scream, invocation, denunciation, is the most prominent of the album, without mincing words, there are too many things wrong, in rock as in the world.

The experimentation is missing, which in music was lived almost religiously within the recording room, a moment of contact with a higher spirituality, which, inevitably, today is unfortunately increasingly absent. Not to mention the ticks, bloodthirsty and tax-evading, flattening the musical offer.

Strange Beauty is the testament of Bowie and Ferry, in terms of crooning, to the romantic European age. A slow sidereal melody blends, in perfect alchemy, with Foxx's singing, slow and evocative; in the plateau, the evocation of a Beauty that hides behind the jaws of the world, a blurred and suggestive perception, that lives among the shadows of a past, never so close.

Perhaps it is there that we all are now, at the beginning of a new cycle, in the company of the best minds of this generation.