Mogwai
Earth Division EP

The past in uncertain times takes on a vibrant hue in its stagnation, unable to evolve since it is past, and cannot leverage a present in evolution. And so there are those who delve into moments crystallized in scattered instants along the line of music.

I open the package and find this nocturnal cover, a lion wanders in a land, it is dark, it is something primordial. The opposite of a city where cars weave trails and lights on a gloomy day, where buildings rise like dolmens of civilizations in slow decline, already tending to be almost only past, with not much more to say.

I slide the vinyl out of its sleeve and it's already a moment lost in a calendar that does not mark the year 2011, or maybe it does and I can't quite read it. It's an action that probably, at my age perhaps, my father had already done with an ELP record, which even then was diving back into memories, Emerson was retrieving timeless melodies whose eternity was being tainted and tied with cables entering massive synthesizers, and entering my father's ears and those of thousands of other nostalgically futuristic youthful individuals. And I am in the same situation today.

I lift the transparent cover of my turntable, headphones already on, and lay down Earth Division EP by Mogwai on the platter, raise the tonearm and position the needle. I sit on the floor, a piano, "Get To France" is more Chopin than the dying post-rock everyone talks about (everyone? really?). Eyes strictly closed, a cliché, just for such a timeless moment. It feels like two hundred years ago that I bought Rock Action, in a record store that WAS because it no longer exists, and yet it's only ten, and just before I had also bought Kid A. The strings enter, the melody opens up and a synth with a music box sound joins the delicate, nocturnal notes of the piano, and they move towards space, the space of another time. "Hound Of Winter" is like walking on rooftops, it's POPular, a delicate singing that caresses a classical guitar and accordions and strings, and I see the sun rising in a grey sky, one lone and still star, time is the undisputed protagonist "Time Hides Things/Lies Hides Things/I hide things/I break things/I forget/I fall away/I'm tired", and the more I think about it, the more I think that I too am falling somewhere, and I break things (my room is full of things that have shattered, one of these is me), and I lose sight of things, perhaps we all are, because we accelerate without caring to brake, indeed, we buy cars without brakes. And like a tape, everything unwinds towards evolution, willingly or not, it's up to us to decide whether to carry it through or let it languish on a bed, to laze around until it gathers dust, that’s how the movements of "Drunk And Crazy" are born where the fuzz of the guitars, the fuzz of electronics, and perhaps even "alien" percussion, perhaps even those in fuzz, go to throw themselves into the mouth of a cello that introduces the small orchestra into the palace of the future, the piano returns to being the absolute protagonist of a heartbreaking song that forcefully thrusts its fingers into the synthetic fuzz returning, madness and drunkenness and sadness and uncertainty become strength and drown in a cold, cold sea.

And in the end, one must always return home after a journey, in the end, one must always stop thinking about before and try to think about after, find what we have been up until today, what we have played and listened to up until today and transform it into something even more of our own, even closer to the distance of our thought, can this always happen?, it's a question you cannot avoid asking, it's a moment from which you cannot escape. It's the eternal return.

The needle lifts. But I don't feel like doing so, I remain there seated, with the headphones pressing against my ears, and a vaguely restorative silence makes its way around me.

Hardcore might really be dead. And me?