Paul Chain
Master Of All Times

Paul Chain is someone who lost sleep to make music, and I'm not joking: at a certain period of his life, since during the day he had to work to make ends meet (because he couldn't live on music alone), the national Paul found himself playing (and recording) at night, risking (and maybe reaching) nervous exhaustion.

 

But evidently, Paolone couldn't do without playing (and recording), and so his discography is one of the most extensive you can find around, to the point that I challenge anyone (even the most devoted fan) to raise their hand and say, “I have them all!”

It's impossible to have them all, both because they're not easy to find and because it's truly a lot of material. It's as if, annoyed by the significant success that the (no longer his) Death SS were gathering, he wanted aristocratically (and barbarically at the same time) to step out of the circle of music that sells, to take refuge in an underground world where everything, in total freedom, and in total disregard of the rules of the music business, could be published. Everything.

It's difficult therefore to navigate this jungle of publications, among bands, pseudonyms, side projects, and a solo career. “Master of All Times,” recorded live on Halloween night in 1999 and published in 2001, is part of the “Paul Chain – The Improvisor” series, a label under which the most experimental albums, detached from the heavy-metal word, come to life, of which Chain himself remains an extraordinary interpreter.

To begin with, “Master of All Times” doesn't feature the guitar, the instrument of choice for Catena; therefore, an album of keyboards only, a work that nonetheless continues to carry the DNA of the musician from Marche: improvisation, visionary talent, hallucinogenic sounds, mystical atmospheres, and so much (so much) love for the Seventies.

No longer therefore Black Sabbath, doom, heavy-doom, very-doom, psycho-doom. But even in “ethereal prog” guise (as we might define the sounds of “Master of All Times”), Chain's music retains all its charm. And the album in question holds its own alongside the most successful works of Our man's solo career. Hard to make comparisons: Chain's personality remains strong and unwavering, despite the continuous nods to cosmic music, space-rock, and the magical progressive of the Seventies. But here the character of an improvised jam session doesn't get confused with the fumes of raw psychedelia, considering that the five tracks here (which could indeed be seen as a singular suite of forty minutes) progress thoughtfully, without ever overflowing beyond the boundaries of the comprehensible.

And so Danilo Savanas's drumming moves metronomically, offering the ideal framework for the free variations of the keyboards expertly handled by (the excellent) Chain himself, who uses his instrument in a "Hendrixian" manner, at times approaching the attitude of the great Mike Ratledge from the legendary Soft Machine (alongside we find the floating flute of Anna Alier, the electrified violin of Filippo Rollando, and the swirling effects provided by Erica Scar).

It's a jazzy piano, not coincidentally, that opens the dances of this little gem of free and daring music: the eighteen and a half minutes of “Strange Philosophy of Life” hypnotize, produce visions, and at the same time progress quite well, well anticipating, between pauses and restarts, what we will find in the remaining portion of the album, namely a sort of “progressive hybrid” suspended between the late Sixties and mid-Eighties, still permeated by those fairy-tale settings that characterized the first incarnations of progressive rock, but already projected towards the repetition and experiments of the most hallucinogenic kraut and the electronic music that was consolidating itself over the Seventies, to then definitively plasticize rock in the Eighties decade.

The pressing and varied “Spiritual Way” (almost ten minutes) evolves the discourse by animating the cross-tempi of Savanas, which become the disjointed backbones of a homogeneous sound flow: a sound flow that undulates in a permanent unearthly wave where what prevails is the technique of vibrato that distorts, deforms, and frays the textures woven by Chain's keyboards, which navigate well between obsessive Hammond organ solos, visionary carpets, and oblique piano flashes.

After the ambient pause named “Inexpicable Inwardness”, the reprise of the initial track “Water of Verity” and the reprise of the reprise “Hoping for Better Things” bring the work back to the tracks of what had been the majestic opening suite, this time, however, as if retracing the road backward, where the tapes seem to rewind and the keyboards clog and twist under the relentless blows of a drum that returns to beat relentless and inexorable cadences. The journey ends in a fade that suggests eternity, even though the journey only lasted forty minutes. Space and time: all relative.

“Master of All Times” is thus, fundamentally, irreparably a trip: blurred images, black-blue-light blue hues that inevitably tend towards mystical shores (but mysticism steeped in the artistic greatness of the man behind the project). Chain's falsetto, as scripted, retraces the hallucinated phonemes of a completely improvised language, becoming one more layer of a music that likes to float harmoniously, in total freedom, responding only to the dictates of the inspiration of the moment.

It's saddening to read on the artist's website that Chain's artistic death, by the author's own will, occurred only a few years later, in 2003 to be exact. But we are convinced that even under the pseudonym of Paul Cat, Chain will know how to continue to gift emotions.

Paul Chain is dead. Long live Paul Chain!