Thursday, October 30, 2008  1:01 am 

Voices of Syn

As the rose continues to lose it’s bloom for another year and a feeling of serene melancholy floats around in the air, I’ve lately found myself entranced by the disarmingly beautiful, and often excruciatingly sad psych folk sounds that emanated out of South and Latin America in the 60s and 70s. Recently I tried, and inevitably failed to explain the kind of astral wonders Congregacion crafted in the Chilean mountains, and now I’m going to futilely attempt to describe the dying-of-the-day grace that pours out of the music of Pep Laguarda & Tapineria.

Pep Laguarda & Tapineria - Alceu-vos, xe, que ja és de dia

In the same way Congregacion tragically only bestowed a single, lone LP upon a largely undeserving world, Catalonian folks Laguarda, Pep & Tapineria, with production assistance from none other than Daevid Allen of cosmos commanding psyche wizards Gong only ever managed to conjure up Brossa d’Ahir, a record which intoxicates like a hazy dream having taken form that grabs your hand and gently leads you further and further astray from reality, down the rabbit hole and out the other end, to a place where days are wiled away riding on horses of silver and gold who gallop across the azure Atlantic blue in search of nothing in particular other than the transcendental.

A body perishes along with the dying, wilting rose tattoos that adorn it, a woman lives a happily Buñuel-esque kind of existence inside a house that’s continually and inexplicably on fire, and a little girl daydreams of flying to Heaven accompanied by thousands of pieces of pizza with wings, and throughout it all run the delicate piano led strains of Jon Brion’s latest precious composition that underscore the tender surrealism of Charlie Kaufman’s masterpiece Synecdoche, New York. It may indeed be the case that to fully comprehend the simple magic of this song, one has to have experienced the existentialist tone poem it was created for, but God knows I’ve always been a sucker for the sort of well crafted and timeless smoky eyed balladry, shaded in darkly ambient tones, that with a hop and skip usually mask a dance into the oblivion of the soul, the type of music David Lynch and Julee Cruise unnervingly enveloped all the secrets of the black lodge in, as if wrapping a gorgeously soft piece of silk around a bloodied knife covered in gristle.

Jon Brion & Deanna Storey - Little Person

“Is That All There Is” by Peggy Lee is hands down one of my all time favourite smoking songs in the world, and I have many fond memories of languidly hanging out of windows with my Kindred, absorbing, listening intently to each utterance as if with every individual line we watched a new crack develop in a heart made of glass shared between the two of us. Listening to “Little Person” I feel the same resigned acceptance of life’s disappointments that possesses Peggy’s lament, but with an added dose of hopefulness, and I can’t help but feel as if someone is slowly taping up that heart of glass, piece by piece and bit by bit.

labels >> Jon Brion, Pep Laguarda and Tapineria