Snakefinger
Against the Grain

I have admiration for compilations but inevitably, it's as if they do it on purpose, there's always that track missing that you expected, that cherry on the cake is missing. Here, instead, you overdose on all the cherries (what beautiful cherries, oh! what beautiful cherries) that the little serpent Philip Charles offers instead of the apple. One after the other, not a single one goes wrong, a perfect assembly of chosen pieces.

The random agglomeration drawn from his previous works for Ralph Records is exhilarating, unsettling, chaotic, cryptic, confusing, it slithers, boasts, winks, serves, amazes, haughtily, stridles, cradles, and, in its own way danceable, invites you to leave everything, divinizing reality in a "straccionesque" fashion.

The surprise lies in the impersonality of the music that invites a backward journey on muffled clangs of scattered memories from our childhood, adolescence, youth, and while remaining "fresh," the sounds are steeped in eternity, and we acquire millennial maturity listening to this ancient music disguised as pathological intersections in the meanders of eons. Mercilessly fun, cynical, definitive the work, pure play, a pleasure that excludes the sinful: imperceptibly untarnished.

Sir Lithman chisels an invisible real life, offering indolently an easy-to-drink libation at first glance, but which unleashes, without warning, a chain reaction of sparkling psychic deja vu that can never be rationalized, inviting an internalizing implosion that triggers transcendental joy tinkering on playful tunes, pantomiming grimaces, playing hide and seek, mystifying a free will that here is not framed in projects of carnal acquisitions.

We float on this magic carpet that, with the emergence of a mild seasickness, perpetuates a compassion to restart the eternal return of putting the needle back on the vinyl, with the "common sense" of the biological vehicle left outside the door.

And the holy Trinities of two of my masters powerfully resurface in the alienating burlesque of the record, those of Richard Benson (Let's move on; And now back to us; But anyway...) and the Prince Bijan of Telemarket (toccage, palpage, accarezzage) where an apparent nonsense throws us into pure sensory purification and does not expel us from Paradise, rather.

Let's be left speechless as in the photo of Snakefinger on the back cover of the LP, and let ourselves "be infused" by all this bounty that this unparalleled compilation brings out. Heart condition permitting, dare to listen, dare...