Peter Gabriel

On April 21, 1836, on the banks of the San Jacinto river, the Texan army defeated the Mexican forces, soaking the plain of present-day Houston with the blood of more than six hundred soldiers. Over two thousand kilometers away, in California, another San Jacinto separates the city of Palm Springs from the Agua Caliente Indian reservation. Which of the two, or of the countless others scattered across the United States, is the “San Jacinto” of Peter Gabriel? It's impossible to know.

World music, activism, abstract geographies

Gabriel sings of snow and a mountain, but around Houston there are no snow-capped peaks. Then again, the artist's inspiration came from an encounter with an Apache, a people found throughout Texas but not in California, just like the bison repeatedly mentioned in the song.

“San Jacinto” is therefore an imaginary place, an artistic fiction; just as world music is, according to Peter Gabriel. A studio alchemy in which distant places and cultures converge, along with centuries-old traditions and the latest, futuristic advances in music technology. The goal is not to portray reality. As Paul Klee said: “Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible.” Revelation: that's the aim of “San Jacinto” and of the other abstract geographies on the album that contains it.

The holistic spirituality of Native Americans, the cultural emptiness of steakhouse America, the anguish of battle between two equally invasive armies fighting over land that belongs to neither: all these images merge in the hermetic verses of "San Jacinto", conveying the full tragedy of a millennia-old civilization erased in an instant, swept away like the bison from its prairies. So that "I hold the line" of the chorus - the anguished voice of the Apache feeling his senses fail after a snakebite - becomes the voice of the soldier who knows he's doomed yet resists with all his strength, and suddenly the voice of an entire Native nation desperately trying to keep itself alive.

This fourth solo album - titled "Peter Gabriel" in the UK, "IV" in Italy and "Security" in the United States - is without doubt the artist's personal contribution to the struggles for identity, freedom and equality being waged across half the world. "Wallflower", which tackles the subject of the South American Desaparecidos, follows in the vein of "Biko" from the previous album and echoes the similar activist efforts of Paul Simon's "Graceland". But its coda goes well beyond generic political solidarity; it's an artistic manifesto, the moving statement of intent from a musician who refuses to surrender to the West's decimation of the world's cultural wealth: "Though you may disappear, you're not forgotten here/ And I will say to you, I will do what I can do".

It was 1982: two years earlier, Gabriel had launched WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance), an independent festival promoting cultural diversity through music. In 1989 he would go on to found Real World Records, still today home to a long series of projects bringing together artists from every corner of the globe and every musical background.

The roots of the sound

For Peter Gabriel, saving a tradition doesn't mean locking it away in a reservation where it can be preserved just as it was. On the contrary, it means bringing it to life in the present, letting it engage with others. And even projecting it into the future. That's why Real World releases were never meant to be more or less philologically faithful reconstructions of some lost original style, but bold musical explorations starting from traditional backgrounds while embracing the newest expressive tools. And for the same reason, "IV" itself stands right at the forefront of sonic experimentation, both in its instrumentation and in its compositional structures.

Among the first buyers of the hugely expensive Fairlight CMI computer/sampler, Gabriel puts it to pioneering use on "IV". Essentially the first commercial synthesizer to combine additive synthesis, 8-bit processors and advanced digital computation techniques (fast Fourier transform), the Fairlight is the absolute protagonist of the album's sound. Rather than using it as a lavish "orchestra simulator" or as just another galactic keyboard monster to add to his post-Seventies arsenal, though, Gabriel pushes the instrument into musical territories that had never before been explored - or even explorable. The Fairlight becomes a "miracle machine" capable of turning into music things that had never been music before: noises, gusts, crashes, every kind of draft and clatter. A film from the time shows the artist wandering around a hill of industrial scrap armed with a microphone, thrilled to extract the most bizarre sounds from it, later assembled into the feverish mantra of "The Rhythm Of The Heat".

"IV" also develops innovations already introduced on the previous album. "I Have The Touch", "The Family And The Fishing Net" and "Lay Your Hands On Me" refine the use of the gated drum devised for "Intruder" (a combination of reverb, compression and noise gate that gives the kick drum a particularly "dark" and powerful effect), while "Kiss Of Life" extends the trick with other filters to achieve ever more "tailor-made" drum sounds. The album's sound is made even more dynamic and shape-shifting by bassist Tony Levin's use of the Chapman stick, a ten-string instrument played percussively using the tapping technique.

The atmospheres of "IV" are thus worlds away from the glittering polish of other bands who were tinkering with synths like the Fairlight at the time. On the contrary, they are restless, molten, haunting. The nervous mood is heightened by the use of odd time signatures ("Kiss of Life", with its chorus in 10/4), disorienting Middle-Eastern-derived minor scales, and interlocking parts closely related to the King Crimson of "Discipline" and the David Bowie of "Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)". Everything seems geared toward evoking tension, sending shivers down the listener's spine, making them coexist for the album's forty-five minutes with an unspeakable, alarming presence. Something that slips away, remains dull and confused like a weight on the chest, but is undeniably there.

The monkey unmasked

What Peter Gabriel brings to the surface on "IV" is a deep soul, an atavistic spirit that breathes through the artist's "breathy" voice, that lurks in the synthetic, cavernous backing sounds of "The Family and the Fishing Net", that can be felt in Peter Hammill's backing vocals on "Shock The Monkey" and "Lay Your Hands on Me". This is the object of the "unveiling" carried out by the album's abstract geographies: the collective unconscious, the "shadow" that, according to Carl Jung, unites and accompanies every human being. The opening "The Rhythm Of The Heat" was inspired precisely by an experience the Swiss psychologist had with tribal percussionists; its working title was "Jung in Africa".

"IV" is not just a celebration of humanity's cultural richness, nor merely an unmasking of Western superiority complexes: it's a portrait of our species through its customs and unconscious reactions - an animal devoured by instinct in "Shock The Monkey", craving the trust of the pack and physical contact in "I Have The Touch" and "Lay Your Hands On Me", blindly trusting intricate marriage rituals in "The Family And The Fishing Net", possessed by music in "The Rhythm Of The Heat", seized by trance in "Kiss Of Life", led to paradise by pain, natural visions and crystalline synths in "San Jacinto".

Peter Gabriel's fourth album sold millions of copies, broke through in the American market - where it was released under the title "Security" - thanks to the single "Shock The Monkey", opened the doors to the world music boom, and exerted an enormous influence on many other musical territories through its revolutionary use of instrumentation. But its uniqueness lies elsewhere. More than the lyrics, even more than the sounds and structures, it's perhaps a single image that sums it up most effectively: the singer's face painted with the features of a monkey, as it was throughout the long tour that accompanied the album's release. A bestial mask that writhes, moans, shrieks, exults at the sight of its own kind, in a tangle of uncontrolled emotions that, more than anything else, reveals the deep, shared, immortal nature of our roots.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

14/10/2012