Phil Manzanera
6pm

LA RECENSIONE

A DAY OF AWAKENINGS AND BROKEN DREAMS
or facing the Milanese September with Phil Manzanera

I remember listening to this album around the time it was released, which was around July 2004. I appreciated it, but didn't fully enjoy it; there was something I still couldn't grasp.
Now more than a year has passed, and I understand. I understand that "6pm" had to wait to be summoned by this contradictory September: indecisive and furious, sunny and torrential, hot and rainy, gray and muggy...
...because here the songs and instrumental suites move just as this Milanese September continues to rise and drag on.

We wake up in the morning with the psychedelia of "Broken Dreams", it's like opening the blinds and as the light floods the room, we project our lives from a very high floor; then suddenly we find ourselves in the funky-pop of "Green Spikey Cactus" and in a futuristic music video, within half a frame, we are teleported into the daily rush. "Love Devotion" is forgetting everything; it's dreaming of our beloved whom we have left still hidden among the acoustic velvet covers and pillows of violins. We wish her all the best with "I Wish You Well", an ideal psychedelic continuation of the previous track, scarred by Chrissie Hynde's harmonica, the first of many guest appearances on the album. But it's time to wake up again, recover the spirit from where we left it, there between the covers, to realize we are on the subway, and notice that the hours are passing faster and more hysterically than we need; now the frame is a shaky fast-forward showing a public clock scratched by the rush of the hands and the rain.
We arrive exhausted in the middle of the day, and in the sixties ballad "Waiting For The Sun To Shine", the sun is already filtering into the office, eyes coloring with hope, a flashback shows us all the light exploding in the room in the morning again. In that precise frame, we return to dreaming for the rest of the CD: the rem phase is the psychedelic piano of "Manzra", while with the prog of "Cissbury Ring", we find ourselves on a hill in Hobbiton, in the distance spotting Robert Wyatt playing trumpet and drums, and it's still him who through the dreamlike interlude of "Porlock" leads us to a "Shoreline" where the saxophone of Roxy Music finds new life; Wyatt again guides us into the spatial territories of "Always You": now the frame is that of the film "Contact" where the protagonist meets her father on a beach at the edge of universes.
Of course, like in a reversed "Vanilla Sky," we realize it was all a dream, and upon waking, we find next to us the guitar David Gilmour loaned to the unrest of "Sacred Days". Everything is over, and everything is ready to start again, or rather everything must begin anew, with other cold and warm mornings, sounds of blinds rising, and planets falling asleep adrift in some sea abandoned in August.

I hope I've managed to convey the idea of an album that is something more than the Roxy Music reunited with Eno and without Bryan Ferry, something more than the solo endeavor of a great guitarist aided by many guest appearances, perhaps something like a dream of past psychedelia and future sounds that slowly fades with the onslaught of the first morning rays and the violence of the 6 pm rains...