Saturnia-music to escape
'Hydrophonic Gardening', Saturnia`s new album, powers the previous sound quest.
If the "progressive-retro-progressive"-dream is the same, its musical translation is touchable like it never was.
"Saturnia were allways voluntarily predisposed to a don quijote like existence", tells us Luis simões, Saturnia "main-man" and since "Namaste", among many other things, Blasted Mechanism`s guitarrist- While he empties the tea pot at nightfall on a Lisbon cafe saying goodbye to another day.
When cervantes came into the conversation, we had allready seen the new album through the eyes of its creator (the co-pilot Francisco Rebelo, cool hipnoise`s bassist, is kept for studio and stage), we had allready heard him declare that "for Saturnia, reality in something that doesen`t matter"
Those who know their first, self titled, 1999 recording and the debut album, The Glitter Odd, released two years after, need no suplementary explanations-They allready know that Saturnia are a musical ufo gravitating over the pop universe, people that follow a different corse to those orbits drawn in the twists and turns of popular music.
"It is profoundly idealistic, utopic music, even romantic in the sense of of romantic school, romantic art.It is music made for those who listen to it to escape, but it is also made because those who create it need desperatly to escape constantly"
It is music-we say- that stands the test of time because it doesen`t worry about leting time flow, music made by people to whom the travel is more important than the destination, objectivating frontiers, music made by people who took the ship of set the controls to the heart of the sun halfway and continues in the discovery of secrets to unfold-the possible ones between the ignored reality and the one created when the mind submerges in sound.
Its certain that, in the begining, Luis simoes was very objective: Saturnia had as purpose to fuse the psychedelic dream of the 60`s and 70`s(prog and head music) with what he saw as its spiritual descendants: the rave culture.That was in 1999.Four years latter, listening to Hydrophonic Gardening is leaving aside the preciseness of the formula.The sonic drift is totaly achieved in a language of its own."As far as objectives and direction are concerned, i think this is our most solid record.Its the third step, the last step before a new stairway" says Simoes."all the influences are there-kraut , psychedelic, progressive,They were assimilated but brainly mixed.All diluted in one thing"
Simoes presents that "thing", Hydrophonic Gardening, as the result of a "profoundly spiritual year of yoga and meditation".We had realized the zen yearnings sometime ago, what else but the arrival to that nothingness where all unites, may mean the slow but tremendously strong hypnotic character of this music?
The tunning, however demands us to ask: is it in that search for serenity that we may find the genesis of Hydrophonic Gardening?"i alternate moments in wich i simply exist- have fun, wear myself as much as i can- with others of hipocondria.Then i need an axis to reequilibrate things.The recording phase was one of these periods.After a year loaded of "rock" i was drawn out.I stoped smoking, drinking, turned myself to teas, restarted doing yoga-wich i do to stay healthy, and when i feel allright i leave again for something more toxic.Hydrophonic Gardening happened in that time lapse and" he confesses"it was extremely therapeutic".It was then from self-therapy that was born another journey through a microcosmos to wich there are hardly any available guides.It is strange that to purchase the ticket we have to go the
italian Mellow Records site (www.mellowrecords.com)- there is no portuguese distribution of the cd..., but the offered escaping is worth the trouble.If you stop the car by a clif and look at the sea while the record plays in the background, don`t be surprised.It is a visual cliche foreseen in the manual of Luis Simoes`s dreaming machine.
DN 19/12/2003 Mario Lopes
