Six by Seven
If Symptoms Persist Kill Your Doctor

In the current building of Quantegy planted in Alabama, in 1943 tapes were made for the American army stationed in Berlin for interception operations. Even Eisenhower had something to congratulate when one of the tracks revealed Hitler in the background: he was trying to explain that at best they all had to start over. There was a general laugh.

Sixty years and thousands of wars later, Quantegy is now fighting an internal one: avoiding being the last producer of analog media ready for shutdown. For those like me who are incurably nostalgic, a visit to the world's largest cassette museum (www.studio2.freeserve.co.uk) managed by an anonymous benefactor is recommended: if you have a somewhat rare piece of memory, they might even buy it. What is the fate of physical media and its distribution policies? And what will be the music of the future? Consumer Pop or electronics like in a nightmare? How will we understand where man ends and the machine starts? In the United Kingdom, more samplers are sold than electric guitars, and it is not unlikely that someone returning from the future has already let these kinds of mafiosos know that one fine day the guitar disappeared completely. That the new John Lennon in 2042 is a DJ.

Meanwhile, Koopa has become the first unsigned group to enter the UK Top 100 of all time.
The truth is that this chart was the first to include downloads, that is, the close relatives of Koopa, plus friends and quite possibly some friends of friends plus someone who happened to pass by and got pushed in; all this even if the song does not exist in physical format.
Just a decade ago it was completely different: every operation aimed to push a single as high as possible, no problem if it then suddenly plummeted - the first week was all that was required for the album presentation. They were the last flames of grunge: the expression “Buying team” came into use, people paid to buy records in an attempt to boost immediate sales. But changing the charts will tell us more about ourselves, which is that no one is destined to change. It will tell us that music-non music (i.e., almost all of it) will have an even longer life in the charts of the most voted brainwashing; that after the disappearance of vinyl, now they will completely make physical format disappear, helped by these hordes of young people in indefinite connection like work at the land registry office. They will learn to know hundreds of music titles but will have no idea what its meaning might be.

It's a long story of the trio (for a long time there were five of them - anyway, it's always little understood) from Nottingham, the Six. By Seven. Three feverish records in quick succession and increasing success, the last always better than the previous one and the last of them all one of the best of the season ("The Way I Feel Today"). At that point (it was 2002), Six. By Seven sat at a table and inexplicably asked themselves a couple of my questions. They probably closed their thoughts with a couple of laughs about that unforgettable first concert, which unlike love, everyone knows is the only thing you never forget, and again unlike it, you'll always be proud of it. Six. By Seven had prepared a brave noise-psychedelic suite of sixteen minutes, and all can be said except that it was timid: they finished the song although the twenty-three spectators had left Leicester's Charlotte seven minutes and twenty-two seconds ago. Anyway, after that huge triptych, the record company started to exert such pressure that a follow-up came, "04", like four and like two thousand and four, and it was frankly unlistenable. With the year 2005 came the end instead, which everyone knows unlike love seems endless. The "Left Luggage at the Perivil Hotel" (first live and then with the studio edition both self-produced) immediately sees the light, and eats up another frankly very unnecessary 30 euros. If you were still alive and they hadn't managed to reduce you to poverty, a half-dozen singles would follow, a record of rarities and b-sides and finally, in less than twelve months, "Artists, Cannibals, Poets, Thieves", which for a moment made me breathe: I managed to ignore it for three months. Anyway, over the distance, it’s a good album.

Since that day Six. By Seven no longer distribute through common policies. To buy (still at quite a few euros, it hasn’t changed much) "Club Sandwich Perivil Hotel" (most likely recorded at the same Hotel but in another internal club), and this highly autobiographical "If Symptoms Persist Kill Your Doctor" released these days, you need a credit card, a still considerable bank balance (so you can always follow your idols' record affairs) and order it on the official website. Limited edition never exceeding 1000 copies, which to prolong your anguish also takes away the satisfaction of telling them to go to hell for the first three months. Time is running out: time is changing.

Six. By Seven plays, in "If Symptoms Persist...", the usual mystical convulsion My Bloody Valentine-Stone Roses, over the years more and more akin to the former than to the Mancunians, and especially increasingly anarchic and unlistenable. A wild and acidic psychedelia, a riff of overlapping guitars like a wall (in the initial "Nations" there isn’t even any singing), which at the end of these three-quarters of an hour still sounds like a big laugh, the same under which record companies probably buried them.

A laugh played by a fistful of enormously talented musicians, the same reason why I am one among a thousand unlucky people who ordered a "luxurious limited edition cardboard copy" and found myself with two blank sheets and 8 song titles on plastic for the equivalent of the gas bill. Not a page on the web, not a review, nowhere two words on these three-quarters of an hour of shoegaze laments, not even a cover to borrow if you don’t have a scanner.

And over the distance at certain points, it even seems like a nice album.