Mazarin
Watch It Happen

I knew a young boy, with a pleasant sparkle in his eyes, who had the air of someone who really didn't know how to ask anything from life. An expression that spoke of inscrutability, which perhaps was his personal way of communicating how much he appreciated the wonders surrounding him. Simple wonders like a September sunset or the pleasant aroma of sand wet by the sea water.

I wonder where that young boy went. From time to time, I would talk to him about music and enjoyed teasing him about his tastes. We became very empathetic and accommodating towards each other. I liked asking him what he found beautiful in music, in the little that he recognized as his and that could ignite a spark of life in him. And he enjoyed responding with that hoarse voice, shaded like powdered tempera colors.

For instance, he said he appreciated the dark, deep, and rhythmic nature of heavy sounds, the simplicity and sinuosity of melodies, but I believe that for him the word music represented a kind of evocation, like a giant album of memories, where each page brought new and different ones. He knew how to love simple and seemingly irrelevant things about music. The colorful backdrop of a stage seen at a country fair, the engravings and stories embellishing a guitar, the booklet his dad printed with Beatles' lyrics and chords, in short, the entire universe that revolves around that magical word.

I knew that young boy, we lost touch, and all I have left is a photo memory of him (naturally, it's more than just a postcard).

Indeed, I believe he left forever, carried away by a flow that is partly also this music (a genuine pop-rock, slightly abrasive and distorted, with a dash of psychedelia and electronics?!). He left along with the bagpiper who knocked at his door on a snowy December morning, hand in hand. If you pause to listen closely to "Wheats," you can even perceive in that ecstasy of electric waves the echo of their heartfelt song.

He didn't understand much about music in general, but he would fall in love with some sounds, perhaps the most hidden ones in his soul. He did it with the same naturalness with which he first crushed bees under rocks for fun and then respected them.

The same stubborn naturalness with which he clouded his own consciousness.

A young boy, after all, like everyone else. And like everyone else, he knew how to be led by the hand and guided by the sounds of his life.