Ry Cooder
Paris, Texas

LA RECENSIONE

A man wanders through the desert with a gasoline can in hand, traveling along imaginary and blinding highways, while a scorching slide guitar delves into the soul and at the same time evokes specters of a Rimbaudian boat adrift towards infinity. Who doesn't remember the opening of "Paris, Texas," an unparalleled creative union of three talents at the peak of their genius: Wim Wenders, Sam Shepard, and Ry Cooder?

Cooder has written fundamental pages in the book of contemporary music, both as an ethno-oriented philologist and as an instrumentalist, but it is undeniable that his name will be etched in history, particularly thanks to the ten compositions that accompany the most sublime of Wenders' journeys. Rarely has a soundtrack not only interpreted the essence of the film but even captured its vertigo in sonic fragments capable of going beyond, constituting a perfectly self-referential work. Are you familiar with the scene where Travis runs away for the first time and gets caught on the tracks by his brother?

"Do you want to tell me where you're headed, Travis?"
(Travis gazes ahead and with his eyes points to the infinite).
"What's down there? There's nothing down there."

The essence of "Paris, Texas" lies in this fragment. Down there is the desert, the frontier, the internal and external space: our infinity. And the only way to find ourselves is to traverse it, even if it means passing through the simulacra of solitude. And Ry Cooder has provided the perfect sound of that solitude: a futuristic, harsh, and fiery country-folk like the sandy expanses of Texas, creeping and lethal like a rattlesnake. Accompanied by David Lindey's bow and Jim Dickinson's barely struck piano, Cooder stages a sparse yet spectacular animation of the unknown, almost always playing with the weights of the slides but also letting the slips of other fingers loose.

Consider the simple chords of the title track, the true archetype for all "desert rock" to follow: from the magnificent Thin White Rope (especially for the visionary foundation) to the frontera of Calexico, inspired by that sinuously enveloping slide that seems to embody the suffering of the dying Indian of Morrisonian memory.
In these ten tracks, the world manifests as an endless series of answers to an invisible enigma, hidden in the folds of sand. To put it in the words of Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury": it is the grave and desperate sound of every mute torment under the sun.