Voice Farm
The World We Live In

THE REVIEW

And the cover seems to capture the moment of two time travelers transported to an isolated place from who knows where. The two youths have a somewhat more sophisticated and modest machine: it provides the travelers with two nice pairs of big underpants, but doesn’t deliver any refreshing snacks. Hence the "frowned" looks of the transported ones. Those nice white underpants that I, too, used to wear in the seventies. Sometimes the elastics were tight, especially on the inner thigh, but how well they kept your balls in place...

Speaking of this, we all have our idiot moments, and several times in life. Mine in relation to this record tells that one day I was fed up with having all those records at home. Yearning for tidiness, I was going through one of my periods of internal cleansing and was also undertaking a material cleanse with the mindset of "the things you own end up owning you." So the goal was to thin out the LPs and reduce the 500-600 I had to less than a hundred, as a first action. I would live off the proceeds for a while by gradually bringing the "loot" to the second-hand section of the record store.

The fact is that, damn it, even this record I am reviewing ended up in the purge along with another thirty that I still regret. I later bought some of them back, but not this one. I was in that phase of dryness and was righteously possessed by detachment from what I desired: it was a 'hit and miss,' indeed the idiot moment. The fact is that some time ago I found the entire record on YouTube and when I listened to it again, I remembered all the tracks and the pleasure of hearing them, and I blurted out at myself: what an idiot!

Charly Brown's voice is perfect, beautifully laid over those electronic layers by Mike Reilly, so unclassifiable, paced by Debra Hanes' drums: no guitars! The record (from 1982!) is joyful yet at the same time unsettling, resulting in the surreal in several passages. The crystal-clear nature of some pieces seems to transport us to a Cotton Club of the twenties from some unknown millennium, a muffled synth club, where the revival is alien.

Dreamy electronics (A.M. City, Follow Me Home), disturbingly attractive pop (Sally Go Round The Roses), minimal cabaret (Davi's Big Battle, Cheeno), seemingly normal songs (Beatnik), psychic rides (Lost Adult, Voyeur), Californian music boxes (Mama Made Me Do It), clear obsessive repetitiveness (Double Garage).

The final Over And Over has a somewhat lazy beauty, giving you the idea of sitting on a veranda in a deck chair, ten minutes before sunset, present with oneself in the inevitability of the inner question: "What awaits us tonight?" Whatever happens, the eternity's boredom doesn't wait, and the sounds of the "farm" help us mitigate the waiting.