Orba Squara
The Trouble With Flying

I don't know how many of you are familiar with what serendipity is.

So, according to Wikipedia, it is "the feeling you get when you discover something unexpected and unintended while looking for something else".

Today, without going into the reasons, I was searching for an iPhone simulator when, browsing through the many videos offered by YouTube on the topic, I stumbled upon a video whose soundtrack seemed to relate to the iPhone much like how Pink Moon related to the Volkswagen Cabrio in a commercial from some years ago.

Acoustic music, anything but technological, oxymoronic in relation to its context, in short.

I had no knowledge of Orba Squara at all before I started looking for the iPhone simulator, now I have definitely gotten to know them through this album (which, however, does not contain the song, "Perfect timing", from the video).

A bit like the usual Nick Drake, a bit like Donovan, a bit like Belle & Sebastian, a bit like Paul Simon, a bit like Devendra Banhart (whom he resembles, but wears glasses; indeed, looking closely, he's actually quite the spitting image of Steve Hackett from the Genesis days with PG), a bit (very much) like our "The Second Grace" (whatever happened to them?), a bit like the sweetest pieces from Mellon Collie & The Infinite Sadness (or, better yet, from Pisces Iscariot), the ones in James Iha's style.

Nothing innovative or transcendent, for sure, except for certain pieces that are, in my opinion, really beautiful ("Come so far", "Maybe", the instrumental "Too").

Probably much due to the "confidential" singing, that way of whispering and suddenly cutting the trembling legs off words, which I so liked in the late Mark Linkous' rendition.

But anyway, this discovery gave me a nice feeling.

I wish all of you a little stroke of "serendipity" like mine, sooner or later.

But also something more important.

If ever one day, while you are busy looking for a pharmacy open on a Sunday, you happen to discover, near yet another relentlessly closed shutter, the woman (or man, depending on sex, inclinations, and tastes) of your life.