Magic Castles
Sun Reign

THE REVIEW

Because you are born a Genius of Minneapolis, and I was born one.

And just to clarify, we're not discussing the magician and dancer Prince Roger Nelson and his physically overwhelming and bonsai appearance, his entourage of beautiful femmes, or that breathtaking hip sway of the Goddess Apollonia, but rather lost souls, stasis, and casually imperial loitering. Of null actions and brazen thoughts towards earthly gravity, emerging from swinging doors, of artists escaping daytime realities, of silent paths on those trails where none of those screams and arrogance dwell. In total oblivion, abandoned even by the senses, by the frenzy of your 13-year-old daughter’s Tik Toks in guepière. Forgotten by the terrestrial world, by the submerged one, by INPS. The subject is wavering, not setting horizons and KPIs, but clearly staggering, crossing solitary through infinite backwaters.

He swirls like Giucas the Casella over gastrointestinal refluxes and non-terrestrial digestive systems; his name is Jason (Giasone), and he also goes by Edmonds, son of Aeolus and Alcimede, patriarch of an invisible ensemble legally named Magic Castles and registered with the Gioconda Dance of Commerce.

Missives sent to the upper floors of Google LLC to restore hierarchical order; to climb to the top of preferences. Google AdWords goes on the market. Mark on the market; haggle on the marked.

Manager Flâneur with dark glasses scrutinizes abysses from above, skyscraper charisma-seekers thoughtfully scrutinize pixels. Silence. Usurp the Prince. Elevate the Soul above the heads of the well-thinkers, conquer persistent anonymity, changer le Monde. Jason, do you really want to climb... or stay still. Forgetting and not seeing, pretending to be deaf.

Tell me, if you want I will be your thrush.

Violated multitude, craved solitude, Magic Castles inflames broken and buried desires, lives of other experiences that weave between the familiar and the alien, a mutant and retro-futuristic genetics of a time... glaringly unspecified. And again, softly and once again, falls into the tightrope and sparkling Sixtie trick, Soft Landing among the toys of sunshine pop, glide landing among patches of colored visions, always gastric refluxes suspended between pop languors and kaleidoscopic progress, that delightful menage a trois between Brian Wilson, Roger McGuinn, and John Phillips; the most dreamy sixties, that fleeing from cacophony, sensory din, the ethereal status quo and non-transition, the venerable and unmistakable style of Jason, that weaving of invisible plots and arpeggios to return to oneself, to those first genetic steps, to the astral nature of the journey, Minneapolis as Argo, the family of the Argonauts like the ancient style of Magic Castles.

The entrance, the ascension, the elevation, that para-olympic leap of our so sensitive soul, is possible only by listening to a single track, the vaporous Surmise, suspended among the smokes of the British Invasion that hit America in the Sixties, before the great wave of San Francisco, the big bands and that first psychedelia that would submerge these soft pop sparks in the waters. Little music surfer, slow-motion surfing among semi-mobile waves, temporal suspensions between one note and another of a Rhodes piano, a time and a place, but in a photo of other lives. Not yours, not yours, or perhaps a memory, of a passage, of Her who is no more, but always lives with You.

Sun Reign the seventh album, or that perfect Euclidean balance of echo, distortion, feedback, and tape loops. In the world of subtraction, that add on of magic in the sound, those unmistakable textures that only 4 cats on the globe care for, who acknowledge Jason's infinite artisan art, the aquatic touch of Poseidon on human fates, be water my friend, maybe Jason Edmonds lacks the physique du rôle to become a new Brian Wilson, maybe this world will no longer be ready to welcome a new Brian Wilson.

Let’s keep Jason Edmonds close, but let’s not try to grasp him with a hand.

He is water.

He is the son of Poseidon.