Tin Hat
The Sad Machinery Of Spring

The Review Doesn't Exist

I really wish my words could have the magic of describing music, but I know, or rather I've always known that it's not, and never will be, the case. Because despite sounding, words are not music and can only deceive us into imitating its essence. Thus, the thousand words I can combine to describe this album will always be a deceit. A deceit that became apparent to me when I reread the words that listening gifted me, fallen randomly on a blank page, like dry leaves on the pavement.

memory,
solitude,
nostalgia,
flow, thinning
slender, sweet, spleen, bitter, clarinet,
lightens,
suspensions, visions.

Folk, feeling, piano, harp, dim light, east, tango, time, lyrical
banjo, meditation, classical, guitar,
soul, vibration
caress, dilated, amber
line, klezmer, violin, navigation, sensitive, charmer,
fog.

Breath, dawn,
soft, moments, strings, imagination, waiting,
tears, night,
evocation,
melody, dream...

I trampled these leaves, these words that instinctively rained from the mind, unable to fully decipher the sensations of the music. So, in the end, I thought of not telling you about the album, but about how I discovered it and what it made me discover.

When I first put this CD in my player, without the faintest idea of what would come out, I was looking for an adrenaline shock to shake me from the unexpected lethargy of this spring. However, the desire for music is sometimes regulated by an unknown uncertainty of one's being. What happened confirms this for me. The few seconds of the first track ("Old World") made me immediately realize that I would find answers I seemingly wasn't looking for. A melancholic atmosphere, dense with chiaroscuro nuances that struck deeply. A violin unfolded in a bitter phrasing, making me imagine the Penguin Café Orchestra immersed in darkness. An emotion pondered at dusk.
But if it wasn't what I was looking for, why couldn't I stop listening anymore? I wish I could tell you, but I don't know. I only know that it continued without pause first for hours, then for days, following the flow of notes in the beauty of acoustic sounds capable of suspending the perception of time. Rocked by the rarefied lights of the guitar, swaying among the enchanting textures of trumpet, clarinet, and violin, a sweet hypnosis dragged me into a velvety, nostalgic, intimate world of instrumental music. A world that I know I cannot communicate.

Hoping, or perhaps deluding myself, to find words to do so, I went in search of news about the group, learning that the name Tin Hat initially hid a trio and now the names of Ara Anderson (trumpet, horn, piano, pipe organ, celeste), Ben Goldberg (clarinet), Zeena Perkins (harp), Mark Orton (guitar, dobro, banjo, piano, pipe organ, accordion, bass drum, bass), Carla Kihlstead (violin, viola trumpet, voice, piano, celeste, vibraphone, bass, harmonica). A thousand pieces of information, surely useful, that however didn't help me overcome the impasse of a description that never came. Much more interesting was the discovery that this album was inspired by the work of Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer killed in Warsaw by Nazi soldiers. I didn't know Schulz, so I started reading a wonderful book of his, finding in a story and to my utmost surprise these words:

"At that late hour, some of those peculiar and so attractive shops sometimes remain open that one forgets about in ordinary days. I would call them cinnamon shops, from the color of the brown wood paneling that covers them. Those noble shops, still open late into the night, were always objects of fervent dreams. Faintly lit, dark and solemn, their interiors smelled intensely of varnishes, lacquer, incense, aromas from distant lands and rare goods." (Bruno Schulz: Le botteghe color cannella - Einaudi)

A revelation! What a wonderful feeling to find intact all the sensations of the album in the reading of a few words, which perhaps were in part its inspiration. Then I realized that although words cannot imitate music, it doesn't take away from the fact that music can imitate words, providing the ancestral sense of their meaning. Now I leave it to you to discover or imagine new things from listening and how mine are inadequate at describing every sensation it might gift you.