THE FUTURE NOW

Something turns on in the brain when faced with the right stimulus...and when a note sounds that seems to "misfit", an alert takes us back from any lethargy in which we might be immersed, it is the door to another way of feeling, less linear if If you like, something like that happens to me with this album. Breakthrough within his own style but with classics of pure Hamillian strain such as "If I Could", "Still In The Dark" or "The Future Now", where he unearthed once again his love for that English classical composer called Henry Purcell. Like him, Hammill created his own Baroque. There are classic periods in life, and others of experimentation, I would dare to say (and this is a personal interpretation) that it is like a kind of trilogy, of which the album that concerns us, "The Future Now", is the first part, "pH7" the second and "A Black Box" the third. All three with nods to the past as well as a flirtation with the future, are a period of transition, but also of search and encounter. Meeting of a life after Van Der Graaf, and therefore uneven, but I consider that not all great works should be homogeneous. There is a new style of recording on this album, a search for updating that can already be seen in the style of recording and singing in "The Second Hand", this is a dark album even within an artist who has frequently delved into those marine depths where light does not reach and whose philosophical inquiry questions the established average. Where post-modernity and antiquity coexist, it is not a door to another world... it is a door to another dimension. Pure melodies recognizable in their meter and cadence are here wrapped in a technological paraphernalia where the use of Electronics, Reverse effects, and Fuzz, either in the dialogues between Hammill's acoustics and Graham Smith's violin, or in the synthesizers creating a twilight psychedelic curtain more than symphonic, they elevate songs like "The Mousetrap" or "Energy Vampires" to another category. With "A Motorbike In Africa" ​​we delve into the depths of this journey, in the most experimental work he has ever done, that period that is only experienced in stages of youth where things are produced that are far from what one will be. Sometimes in these periods the most interesting thing emerges, and this is not only true for art but for life as well, it keeps us awake when human nature tends to do exactly the opposite. You can feel this listening to "The Cut", this entire part of the album with a certain German Krautrock air, crowned by that harmonica that is neither bluesy nor jazzy, but rather apocalyptic of "Palinurus (Castaway)", these last songs on the album They are a unit in themselves...a promise, a road-movie, where do they lead us? There are metaphors of rafts...castaways, a recurring obsession in his work, but he also talks about the "protraction" of doubt!, and how the action of dispelling...something good can emerge from this.