Pink Floyd
See Emily Play / Scarecrow

THE REVIEW

do you know the aesthetics of elsewhere? I imagine you do...

well mix it with the idea of childlike avant-garde... but truly childlike...

mix it with the gifts of chance... actually, with total trust in chance... mix it with bric-a-brac and trinkets...

and anyway, the aesthetics of elsewhere is a subject studied in the Barrettian sects... intensive courses are held...

the lessons address questions such as:

"how to create a space-time portal?"

"how can you achieve the effect of a play of light with a single phrase?"

"what lure, what bait is advisable to catch the darting multicolored fish of the unconscious?"

then yes, maybe it's enough to sleep in a forest...

"I was sleeping in a forest after a concert in the north when I saw a girl stepping forward among the trees, shouting and dancing... it was Emily"... (Syd dixit)

true or not true, what better epiphany for this piece of exquisite and absolute pop madness?...

one of apple seed's favorites, who also sleeps in the woods, on certain mornings, after nourishing himself with the play of shadow and light....

"light shadow, shadow light. there is a thread that sews them" he hums from time to time...

and it is in that thread the secret of psychedelia... that thread that pulls you there where you are a second ahead of the world... just slightly out of sync...

like when you suddenly see something and it is always just before, otherwise, you wouldn't see it...

and anyway, even awakening is a just before... and therefore the best moment to see Emily crying or looking through the trees...

but how many, how many things in this song!!!

a fresh (very fresh) melody, dreamy (very dreamy) and that’s okay...

something that leads towards the stars with that amateurish celestility that touches us so deeply, and that’s okay...

a sharp guitar, and that’s fine...

then there's the tricks and pranks, like that little organ that clicks very quickly and disharmoniously, and that's still okay...

but the whole is so much more than the sum of the parts and really, the miracle cannot be explained...

try listening to some covers of Emily...

Bowie tries to pick up on certain oddities, only succeeding in dragging down to earth a song that was flying...

Martha Wainwright turns it into just a delightful little pop song...

so there was where Barrett's genius lay: bringing, without cerebralism, a sort of bizarre dream, into pop, blowing a light gas into the songs, capable of making the dissonances and oddities fly...

"giving life and mind the right dose of love and magic", these are Riccardo's words, which, even if they were written thinking of the Floyd sound of concerts, it's for that girl who emerges from the trees that I would spend them...

then of course, maybe good Syd took a strange journey accompanied by a luminous little mouse...

but that's a story I will tell you another time...