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Rating: “Searching, you're searching
In images and memories
See these hands are empty
Slowly moving in the air”
At the end of summer, before setting off back home, after lunch, my father would put us to bed. He had a long journey to face, to bring us back home. The shutters weren't completely closed and let the September light in, punctuated at regular intervals of brightness and shadow on the bedroom plaster. With the suitcase shut on the floor, our messy dreams would settle upon that score of electronic music and salty sea breeze, with cats meowing in the courtyard, busy toppling the bins with the restaurant's leftovers.
We were pressed together on a single bed, and our imagination wandered within that sleep that wasn't quite nighttime sleep, but not daytime sleep either. It was the drowsy portal of autumn, the final note before waking, when all this eternity of rest lasted only an hour and the season, like life itself, suddenly underwent its metamorphosis. At that point, it was time to get up and bid farewell to the room—once again unfamiliar, mysterious, perfectly cleaned and arranged for the next season.
A little later, that same year, in October 1987, the legendary label 4AD (Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil) released one of its most inspired works, in perfect harmony with autumnal atmospheres, with the sanctuary of the end of summer turned inward, into the darkness of memory for an autumn to come. A harsh autumn, with the symptoms of a bronchitis caused by an ever colder war, with the incomprehensible whispers of my parents in the living room and the somber faces of Soviet spies on the Gorky Park screens.
As the days dragged on, between boredom and nuclear tension, Peter Nooten was already a promising Dutch musician, never too convinced of his instrument (at the time, drums—then bass, finally keyboards), nor of the musical fate of the new wave aesthetic undertaken with the excellent Clan of Xymox. There were too many come-hither looks, too many magnetic glances, mascara, gloomy smiles and compromises with the music charts. It was no longer the time for that dark, electronic pop-rock mix of the mid-eighties that had swept through Europe until then. Nooten had finally grown tired of himself, let alone trends.
Thus came the encounter of a lifetime, at least the one that gave us his most important album, “Sleeps with the fishes”, with the indestructible 4AD and above all with Michael Brook, the ingenious Canadian guitarist and inventor, the only one capable of elevating Nooten's melodic nostalgia to the highest power and performing a true upgrade with minimal arrangements and crystal-clear recordings that remain honestly unsurpassed in taste and technical mastery, thanks also to the lessons and collaborations with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois.
The song form fades away here, replaced by barely sketched instrumentals, moving lyrics thanks to the author's will to convey an authentic experience—a fragile lived-through emotion in that now-terminal decade of post-music arrogance and television narcissism.
We must also thank the minimalism and grace with which Nooten and Brook were able to create a thread of meaning for the listener, often immersed in a sea of seemingly bleak despair, where memories seem to dissolve and recombine in a sort of measured abyss, yet with no sense of abandonment, as certain far more aggressive dark ambient aesthetics—derived from the same darkwave current—would have it.
This same grace is due also to the vocal movements, with a light, nocturnal declamation, able to leave space for broken piano chords and unusual progressions for those years—innovative, as the many followers who still today speak of Nooten and Brook as pioneering composers of music, and not just of atmosphere, will admit.
In short, this record sounds as if it had been made last year, but without those shabby harmonies programmed by computer that have recently darkened our emotional intelligence as listeners, with the logical and cold artificiality of contemporary drone music.
Instead, we must consider that this work, so effective, born from the pure artisanal and professional creativity of a sound engineer, certainly with the help of Eno and carefully chosen sounds, made use only of the rarefaction of a Yamaha DX7 synth and the collaboration of traditional orchestral musicians, in a decidedly well-orchestrated teamwork that enhanced Nooten's delicately poetic work.
Perhaps we should turn the reasoning upside down. Today, certain albums—ambient but not only—sound like this one simply because, many years later and with other technology, they limited themselves to imitating it very well, but without that same wonderful artistic attitude that in “Sleeps with the fishes” by Nooten and Brook has remained intact as a precious casket—a true time capsule of memory, with their rarefied and evocative sound capable of provoking the same emotional resonances even now, after countless listens.
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