SNOW

Having spent a good deal of the colder months in some kind of unwelcoming embryonic state, I have done the very thing I promised myself never ever to do again: become my own martyr - continuing to drive myself into the ground like a stubborn mole with all the wrong agendas. The failure of love and too much on my plate did have something to do with all of this, but I've always thought of life as something that happens when one is busy contemplating it. It's never about destiny, but rather what river you choose to swim down.

Now, how does all this correlate with Pepe Maina's most recent album Snow - you may well be thinking to yourselves by now? Well, for one, I've always been of the opinion that music can be everything under the sun. It can be terrorizing, huge, frail, beautiful, pelting, soothing, aggravating and just about any connotation one wishes to apply to it. In my warped mindset of late - Pepe's music became a shining beacon of light that helped me climb out of the blackness, I myself, had submersed into.

Through velvety synthesisers, wonderfully melodic and slightly naive guitar strummings, intimate percussive ornamentations - like small ant armies on the prowl, Snow washes over you like a soaring gown of subtle beauty. It's like watching Marilyn Monroe in that old movie, where her dress defies gravity and swoops up over her waist, only in slow motion and in an infinitely more surreal setting......... In many ways, the music found within Snow is very similar to the prog electronic tradition of the Berlin School, yet it's also heavily rooted in a wonderful almost ambient folk music with shoals of melody lines and other such trades you have to search long and hard to encounter in one of those Germanic flavoured records. Talk about contradictory terms, yet with Pepe everything flows.

Contrary to Pepe's first outing, this one comes across far more smooth and satin like. Like stroking a black labrador gently gently..... If you can imagine the floating elegant universe of Jade Warrior cobbled together with the melodic and intimate folk aspirations of Mike Oldfield - and then add to that a somewhat ethereally boosted ambient power that feels like a warm glacier - then you're not entirely off what Pepe is all about. This music is about a deep devotion to nature, watching trees change with the seasons, walking alone through wheat fields having large flocks of birds ascend from all around you like feathered volcanic eruptions.

I use this album for meditation - I use it to calm myself when the world seems like a cruel and heartless place. It's about musical transcendence and what you can achieve just by lending an ear to music. Never forget the power of sonorous patterns with heart and soul people! Never forget.

I was lucky enough to receive this album directly from the horse's mouth, after he'd read my earlier review of his debut album. He felt like I had 'understood' the music, and to me personally, that goes beyond anything I could ever dream of in terms of salary, praise or whatever. I was truly filled with joy - and even more so, when he decided to send me copies of his most recent musical endeavours.

Pepe Maina is all about the music. There's no safety net for him. Like he said in a mail to me - this is indeed the only thing he can do, and frankly speaking, that's something which touched me deeply. Here's a man who's been releasing albums (a lot of them actually!) since the tail end of the 70s, with little or no praise from the surrounding world - and still he proceeds to do what he knows and loves. Sure he's an independent musician, who ever since his second outing has released all of his output through his own label NonSense, but the single most important piece of information I got from his mail, was a clear cut fiery and no nonsense attitude towards music. He lives to make music and he does so from the inner most holy place of his being, and that is something I personally love about him and his work. It literally jumps through the speakers!

With the album entitled Snow, you do get a certain whiff of white frosty surfaces and images of wintery landscapes, but with the omnipresent warmth of the acoustic instruments, you get a counter-pointing effect that mimics the very essence of the Italian winter. Snow-capped mountains with floral bursts of colour in the valleys below - two outer extremes holding hands all through the centuries. It's like the incorporation of a person walking through the crackling snow during this album, and then eventually being bathed in shimmering synthesisers and joyful guitar segments, - with Pepe the music is never one sided. It's diverse and yet wholly cohesive in the way that you never get distracted from the picturesque music's intentions, which is to give to you a dreamy, colourful and transcendent voyage into the soul of one of the most overlooked musicians from the Italian scene.

Recommended to anybody with a penchant for RPI, folk, Jade Warrior, Mike Oldfield, or just wishes to be lead wonderfully astray through music that quite literally exudes spirituality and 'feel'. Some of this is indeed as shiny and bright as a quivering laser-beam shot through an exploding sapphire. It's all right there.

This is for you Pepe. Thank you for the music, it literally pulled me out of a self constructed prison of the mind, and for that I am truly grateful. 3.5 stars.