• Band = Frozen Planet 1969…
  • LP Title = ‘Cold Hand of a Gambling Man’
  • Record Label = Pepper Shaker Records (Digital + CD) + Head Spin (Vinyl)
  • Date of Release = April 22, 2020

Frankly, there’s no real way to describe a musical solo. A solo is a solo. And that statement could literally go on forever. A solo is a solo is a solo…
A guitar solo, like a poem, is arguably akin to the most sublime of arts. In heaven they could possibly last forever, depending on the mood of its beholder.

If this dreamer is partial to a specifically temporal fantasy, we could be in for an interesting ride.

I don’t really think music journalists know how to write about such a thing. It just is. It just happens, exists, and all the other components place it situated in context. How can you write about music? It is a practically impossible challenge. One that instigates many long walks in between words, many twilight thoughts, many revisited considerations, many side As and side Bs and new glasses of wine.
Impossible to write under a deadline..
It also hosts a myriad of cliches, talking about ‘trajectories’; ‘pasts’; ‘change of directions’ and many other things that are perhaps irrelevant.

What I, as a reader of said music review, want to know, is how a particular recording elicits emotion out of the listener, about what it makes them remember. What it could possibly make them forget. The composer is perhaps irrelevant, or as Barthes would maintain, not important to ascertaining meaning out of a composition.

A muted metal solo could fit ever so nicely on an ambient album – thanks to that very small-big-omnipresent thing that we all don’t think about nearly enough – DYNAMICS. This record is said to be the product of improvisation – which I always find interesting in the context of the impetus of concrete pieces of material. Stuff that is now set in stone in the form of a record or release. The real question here is, is this improvised in fragments, then added onto?

Sounds colour vision, and that vision is undeniably a coat of many colours. Although, unfortunately, I cannot describe that coat to you, unless I could whisper it in your ear.
And that’s a clue.

My main curiosity is whether the actors involved intend to perform these songs live – as in, to replicate an improvisation – or whether these ‘improvisations’ were carved out of perhaps semi-structured ‘ideas’ that have a loose form. Other parties have perfected the art of replicating improvisation in the past (Menstruation Sisters), but it’s a hard act for anyone to do.
I think any suspecting sleuth could perhaps listen to the music and figure out this conundrum, but it is perhaps a not-so-open secret.

The music recorded is sometimes all we have – a testament to an exact space in time and the matter taken later or before, at any other location would take on entirely different properties. And the listener also could feel completely different at that moment or another, when the act of listening takes place.
And in that sense, also the act of RE-LISTENING, elicits a sub-conscious memory of perhaps that ‘happy place’, ie ‘the past’, or even the sentimentality of familiarity.

For myself, upon listening, I think of a series of unexplained thoughts in tandem, that perhaps – or arguably wouldn’t have not popped into my head had I not listened to this record.
I think about fresh white bread, about a real-life holiday destination which for the life of me or any-amount of money could I not remember where this was. There was a large mountain, a long river beside a caravan park. The temperature was colder than anywhere near where I live then, now, and in between. Canned Laughter. A bulldogs jersey. An older man who looks like my dad, but isn’t him. He doesn’t make eye contact with me. A game show, although I can’t follow it quickly enough. Making text Bold. A Robe and hotel slippers unused, inside a plastic bag. An animal call. A meow.

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