JAPANESE GUM - High Dreams

1965. A not-yet-twenty-year-old Syd Barrett wanders around a quarry near Cambridge, climbing a chalk wall and running aimlessly through the undergrowth, while a friend from art school documents his psychedelic journey with an amateur camera. Beyond the more or less symbolic value that this (yet another) anecdote about the Madcap carries with it, I've always wondered where the alien, rarefied sounds that accompanied that footage came from.

I thought that distant melody was simply perfect, that it captured in the truest way possible the dreamy, otherworldly aura you could sense in that particular moment, just as I was watching the boy who would later become the piper at the gates of dawn, in direct contact with his own soul and with the world around him.

Someone is probably wondering about the point of this nostalgic, seemingly unrelated introduction of mine. Well, it may sound absurd, but my first encounter with "High Dreams" by Japanese Gum instantly brought me back to that moment, to those images, to those sounds I heard a few years earlier and that moved me so deeply. This is an album that goes beyond simplistic "good-bad" descriptions, one that needs to be lived, understood and breathed in its true essence, where what matters in the listening experience isn't where you are, but what state of mind you're in.

They're called Japanese Gum, a duo from Genoa formed in 2005 and made up of Davide Cedolin and Paolo Tortora, joined by Giulio Fonseca (the mind behind the Go Dugong project) for live shows. After playing at SXSW 2012 and releasing their debut album "Hey Folks! Nevermind, We Are Falling Down" in 2009, the "Japanese gum" duo has churned out "High Dreams", entirely self-produced and already available for a few weeks in digital form (the vinyl edition comes out on February 24th via Etch Wear Records).

This is music with an international scope, at times dazzling in its splendor and almost incapable of staying confined within the standard song format, which from the sticky electronic loops of the formidable opener "Fine Again" onward leads the listener by the hand into a distant, unknown mental place that is nonetheless reassuring, where matter is fluid and space and time cease to exist. The hazy, dreamlike psychedelia à la Atlas Sound of "Comfy" leads us into the towering shoegaze guitars of "Foam made floor", perhaps the brightest star of all alongside the single "Homesick".

At the core there's always the choice of a distant, watered-down, rarefied vocal delivery (which, at least in its pursuit of melodic harmony, bears some resemblance to his majesty Panda Bear), set within a scenario where cosmic excursions are sketched out through a flawless use of electronics down to the smallest detail. That's exactly the direction taken by the echoes, delays and alien reverbs of "Hi Dreams", which serve as a prelude to the synth blasts of the solemn "Ignored" and to the distorted universes of "How To Sleep Well", a genuine journey through space millions of light years from planet Earth. A trip that finds its perfect conclusion in "Waterfall", where the Japanese Gum spacecraft ends its voyage without you even noticing you've come back home.

In short, we're talking about a truly important record here, gorgeous and "real" even in its imperfections. A hypnotic, ambitious album that wants to tear down the doors of perception, one where you simply need to close your eyes, dive in and swim deep. Just like Syd did, in his lysergic, sky-high dreams.

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29/01/2014