Romanthony
Romanworld

Choose any Saturday night in midsummer.
Barefoot on a beach by the sea, drink until you feel the smell of gin emanating from your skin.
Now you’re ready: GO!

It no longer matters where and when. Nor really who. With how, maybe pay a little more attention.

It requires rhythm. Warm voices. Chic.
Repetition helps you lose yourself. The famous labyrinthine disco. The night that never ends.
The insane kiss, the moment of intimacy immortalized forever: the pinnacle of love. The indelible memory. Forgetting it the morning after.

House music is so connected to Saturday night. And Saturday night is so connected to dichotomies.
And detachment is something one needs but in the long run it wears you out and depersonalizes.
The impulse and frenzy of the moment are at the same time life itself and its negation.
The identity lost in an orgy of feelings is still the beginning of a new identity.

It might seem that I'm trying to justify myself and that I'm circling around a bit too much. In fact, I am, but, and here I admit it, certain house music is sometimes what I need on certain midsummer Saturday nights.
The surprise is then discovering a passion for something considered just a background, discovering that the background can also be an art. That the art of the background is something that can excite. And sometimes you have, precisely, the luck of coming across records that completely change your perspective.

Without beating around the bush this time, I will say it concisely: "Romanworld" is a masterpiece.
And it is a masterpiece because it is conceived to be one. A unity, the center of its artist’s identity.

Two records that gather mostly already published material but reworked to present themselves to the listener as a listening experience that must be lived from start to finish.
The long tracks follow one another without pauses (on CD it’s a single track per disc) and guide the listener on a journey that leads to dawn.

The long and conversational introduction stuns with its sound collage and liquid guitars: "This should be played at high volume. You might be missing some of the benefits that stereo can provide"
The beat arrives after a good 10 minutes and enters the headphones relaxed and assured. It will be a constant companion but knows how to blend into the background as well.
There are many guitars, there’s the blues. There are pauses, tribal delusions. Desire, melancholy.
There’s dance, solos where you’d expect drops. There’s Romanthony’s voice pure and free to express itself without having to disguise as a robot.
Long piano introductions serve as preludes to spacey beats on which soul voices accompany end-of-millennium rap.
There's Prince who got lost in a disco. There are discos that leave room for discovery. There are discoveries that make you want to return to the disco.

Unfortunately, I have never found any place where Romanthony's music was played, but it's as if I've been dancing to his music all my life.

Must-have.