Soft Hearted Scientists
Uncanny tales from the everyday undergrowth

Little trip to the hills in search of light. I notice a CD without a case, buried under drum leaves, semi-hidden under the car seat. I pick it up, blow off the tobacco, put it on. Damn, it's Can, the track where Damo sings like a kitten. I crack a smile and the sun smiles too, which this morning is like a glass of orange juice when you're seven. The CD is a mix, after Can there are Neu, and Neu in the car kick like few others. Oh, shit, all's good. Meanwhile, the opening credits roll. However, I won’t tell you about the movie.

And I won’t tell you because I need to get to the point, the point where it's no longer eight but noon, and I'm in the library drawn to an esoteric manual on the most underrated records of the 2000s. I leave it to my music-loving elf to open it randomly, and the wheel of fortune stops at page 52, where on the cover of “Uncanny tales from the everyday undergrowth” stands a strange feline. Then I recall Damo Suzuki’s meowing and decide that, come hell or high water, I must absolutely listen to this album.

So in the afternoon, it's off on another trip, this time not to the hills of Imola, but to Wales. I activate the tube, full album mode, and end up in a timeless little music shop where dreamy craftsmen carve and chisel a strange form of enchantment. In that place, someone points out to me, they preserve ancient sixties forms and study the old canons, the Syd canon, the Incredible canon, the Byrds canon. Imagine all sorts of little bottles and vials that within elixirs and essences pass down the dark secrets of past psychedelia. According to the manual that brought me here, these tender-hearted scientists engaged in “insane and desperate study” of all that arcane goodness, deriving the intention to distill a kind of grammar of wonder. And the beauty is, they’ve succeeded.

Every track coming from that little shop is indeed a magical continuous flow, a perfect unit of sound that blends with relaxed lightness in a swarm of luminous trails and pure flames. One moment you're the constellation, and the next moment one of the countless silver dots, but it doesn’t matter, as following a little spirit in the wind, you are the wind anyway.

Everything is both muted and reflective. With a sort of grace that, marked by an infinitesimal yet constant short circuit, creates an atmosphere of gentle and amused disorientation. “As if someone were answering silly questions seriously and serious questions silly,” Wes Anderson would say.

Moreover, the liner notes are clear: “a sense of wonder that becomes music, the sound of a star flying away at the end of the wall, the spider web crusted with drops of dew... pots and pans, combs and notebooks, banjos and garden gnomes are our shields against the demons of gray rock.”

Notice please how, in a fabulous contiguity between the marvelous and the ordinary, a series of elements usually far apart are joyously holding hands here. Thus stars and pots, combs, and dew don’t clash but harmonize, just as, despite the contrast, the music that carries them doesn’t clash but harmonizes.

And anyway, I'm already mad about these luminous folk-pop mantras that sway like a swing on a sleepy afternoon. Something, mind you, like the most dreamy XTC together with the Incredible String Band, with Syd peeking out as the guiding spirit. After all, only in this way can a nursery rhyme smell of an ancient ballad.

Here, the spaceship is back in my little room, the journey is over. I go out to get some milk. Just outside the door, I find on the road a child’s playing card, with three little bees drawn on it. In my mind, I associate the hive (a magical place) with the little music shop of scientists (another magical place). It's a circle that closes and closes lightly. Also because I know that soon another will open. Au revoir...