Octopus Syng
Victorian Wonders

Helsinki, 2018...

A kind of track by track...

If a small organ christens the flaneur's ecstasy in a sensation of slight madness.

If a sweet taste makes you think of Gemini and Claudine.

If the time machine lands in the romantic nineteenth century.

If a very English sun peeks through melancholy and sweetness.

If a guitar solo grazes the Rock Bottom areas.

If something evanescent paints the reality.

If reality melts into the evanescent.

If a fluttering grace in minor key embraces folk music.

If a happiness without reason...

If...

...

But who are, or rather who would be, these Octopus Syng?

They are people for whom the calendar pages fly backwards, let's say the sixties/seventies, let's say the most indefinite ElseWhen. And ElseWhen works in the way I'm about to explain to you.

The Octopus Syng come from Finland and I know little, if not almost nothing, about Finland. I imagine there are forests, I imagine it's chilly. I imagine grog, lumberjacks, blonde six-foot-tall maidens, deities halfway between Thor and Santa Claus.

However, judging by this album, you'd say Finland is somewhere between Cambridge and Canterbury. A space-time discrepancy not to be laughed at, indeed almost a matter for a nightmare investigator, who, if asked, would tell you that when evident traces of the past are found in the future, the least that can happen is to find oneself floating in the undefined. And this, of course, not only in Finland.

Old England could also be between Sarsina and Bertinoro. And then it happens that you're in the little tavern with piadina and red wine, but if you look out the porthole/window, the usual panorama has gone to hell.

...

If "Victorian Wonders" rocks, it rocks with gentleness. Don't expect shabbiness, don't expect oddities, except a little or just enough.

Here, you limit yourself to passing through a narrow door, only that door is the right one....

Imagine Barrett-era Floyd in cahoots with the softest Canterbury. Track two, for instance, sounds like a song by Syd sung by Robert Wyatt.

Making an appearance, alongside a whole series of minors from that magical era, is also Paul Roland, a healthy carrier of nineteenth-century psychedelia.

But beyond these references, the album has something that is its and its alone. The scent is that of a distant oven, the whiff that of a backroom, the nuances a light mist garlanded on soft colors. Over all, the sudden freshness of an open window.

The music is written on the water and remains on the water. If it escapes, it does so in very thin streams that creep in slowly. Here and there, rare pools of sun gift it a tender and distracted luminescence, as if a slightly out of tune smile were its illuminated mentor.

The suspension, which is a suspension of consciousness and, at the same time, a different consciousness, is a construct of melancholic harmony, a kind of memory that can't be poignant because what it does is only brush with the lightness of a whisper.

How beautiful...

How beautiful!!!