Track By Track: Gigi Masin – Movement

‘Bed on Mars’ opens with the sensation of waking up on an unfamiliar planet, before ‘Lost’ drifts into synthesised trumpet and liminal limbo. ‘The Age Of Sampling’ – a fitting title from an artist who’s been sampled by Björk, Post Malone and Black Eyed Peas among others – runs a haunted rhythm under decades-old radio voices. The title track shifts from booming electro drums into dusky deep house, while ‘UMI’, born from a love of Japan, settles into gentle jazz piano. ‘Golden’ radiates warmth in the register of Göttsching’s ‘E2 E4’, ‘Deception Dance’ pushes into celestial techno funk somewhere between Sun Electric and Kraftwerk, and ‘Azimuth’ pays tribute to John Taylor, the ECM pianist Masin once toured alongside as a trio with Kenny Wheeler. ‘Fifteen’ closes things out in familiar Masinian drone and pad territory, easing proceedings to a close.

Gigi walks us through it track by track below.

BED ON MARS

A bed on the planet Mars, who knows what view of the universe from there. imagine the silence, what an immense emotion it should be to wake up so definitively far from home, as the Earth would seem to us from up there? You may think of the tremendous loneliness, the fear of not being able to survive on that planet, but I only now want to think of the poetry and wonder of being a witness of such magnificence, far from the wickedness of the world, from the envy of people, from those who have never understood you and from the bills to pay. I can scream and sing as much as I want, build sandcastles first on Mars, run and dance, say what I want and even applaud myself for the things I say. There is no worse loneliness than living among people with the desire to go away far away.

LOST

Love is a happy island in the middle of the ocean, Love is the worst day of rain and wind in a cold winter, Love is the emotion of a date in a few hours, Love is the memory of what was not and what was not said, Love is that silly gift but from which you can never detach, Love is the most lying promise that can happen to you, Love is all your life spent looking for love, Love is the only thing that prevents us from falling apart like a plaster statue, Love if it were true love would not need so many books and so many movies to tell us about it… So I get lost, in the nights without peace, in the afternoons without the desire for a book, without the scent of coffee in the morning, I lose myself in your absence, in your not being there, I don’t have a mirror in which to look at myself, my heart is blind without yours.

THE AGE OF SAMPLING

I would have expected everything except someone who had sampled or copied my music. It’s a strange feeling, difficult to accept but, while all the friends around you who don’t create music are enthusiastic about it, you still can’t decide if it satisfies you or if it infuriates you like a bull. The history of art, or rather, the history of man, is made up of copied ideas and pure intuitions that have been improved compared to the original intuition, so it is all a succession of imitations, reproductions, copies of copies of originals. It takes time, because sooner or later it happens that musician who takes a piece of your music and creates something that surprises you, tells you that you are in the presence of a beautiful soul, who has so much to teach you, who has created something really beautiful by capturing some chord that had come to you on a rainy afternoon. And finally you smile, in front of talent you can’t help but smile and be happy to have ended up in the path of that crazy person who likes your music.

THE MOVEMENT

Life is like a river, the water descends towards the sea without stopping, without turning back. So that movement to descend is a sort of rule that is a parallel to life, a path in itinere that considers everything to pass by you as a movement to place. The idea of movement in art is something that does not always look ahead, perhaps looks inside and digs into thoughts, is channeled between memories and desires and does not always take into account the need to proceed, to advance, to take one step after another. Movement is desire for change, the acceptance that one must proceed towards new adventures and try to update one’s language, human and poetic, without falling asleep on the things done by rejecting the unknowns of novelties.

UMI

The sea, in Japanese. But in truth, the sea in Japan is an ocean, majestic, something that intimidates you even on placid sunny days, when its waves caress the coast, instead of breaking like a whirlwind as often happens with storms. The night that has them the same color as the ocean, where you see small points of light getting lost in the waters, brave fishermen on boats that also seem just as brave to you. Yet the magic is enormous, you can’t be distracted by it, there is a breath that goes beyond places and people, an infinite and powerful breath, it tells you that you are so small and fragile, like a grain of sand at the mercy of the ocean sea. Thank the sea, respect it, but be careful that you are in front of a terribly dangerous friend, he knows your every weakness and is absolutely indifferent to your good intentions. He is sincerely unreliable, therefore precious and irreplaceable.

GOLDEN

And here it goes the fairy tale of the ‘Golden Apple’, because those who possess it seem to have not only the gift of happiness and well-being but also will be able to fulfill every wish and defeat every evil, will be blessed by luck and the gods, will have a bright life and will be remembered as an example. What if it were not so? What if luck was not a blessing at all but rather a mocking and far from satisfactory fate? The impression is always that of wanting to see the reflection in the mirror as the true image and not its opposite, as if gold and diamonds had an abominable cost in terms of joy and happiness, as if success at any cost, being gold and silver can be a condemnation, a life that is never complete and never true, the usual appearance of an empty but colorful and sparkling box.

DECEPTION DANCE

Can you dance with your soul? I mean in some beautiful morning, turn on the radio and listen to that song that you love so much, it gives you joy. Too often dance is considered a younger child of the art, if it does not have the white shoes of a ballerina. Denying this human and physical aspect is often typical of those who do not know or do not want to dance, as if it were intellectually unacceptable, an unseemly opportunity. Don’t trust those who don’t want to dance, those who don’t let themselves go to the beauty of the body in motion, that strange way of playing with seduction, that language made up of said and unsaid, whether it’s in the passion of tango and in the frenzy of an agbekor, preparing for a candomblè, the warmth of a ‘ballroom dancing’ (call it ‘ballo liscio’) in the italian countryside.

AZIMUTH

This track is an affectionate and dutiful tribute to John Taylor, wonderful English pianist and composer, who with Kenny Wheeler and Norma Winstone, gave us some of the most enchanting and masterful pages of modern jazz and music in general. They have influenced generations of artists and I will never stop thanking them for the beauty of their music. I have learned to understand the greatness of the artists who, although you would like to imitate, know very well that it is a senseless and ridiculous undertaking. Respect for silence, acceptance of a poetics that does not include imitation, that teaches the humility of magnificence, music that is reflected in nature and has the duration of all the time there is on the Earth. Poetry in the form of notes and chords, a voice that turns into an instrument and an instrument that tells stories, sound as a word, suggests, indicates, it captures you in its poignant beauty.

FIFTEEN

What is the meaning of life and the years that pass? We continue to see ourselves as if time never passes but the mirror is cruel in its sincerity. So the beauty of adolescence, combative and tenacious, arouses envy but also enormous tenderness, seeing them pose as unscrupulous arrogant men, as girls too soon grown up, the game of become the best of you in a world that often does not consider you and is ready to give you a hard time precisely because you are young and beautiful, while the world of the adults, young and handsome it is no longer… Fifteen years are a wonder, an unknown, a promise. A passage of life that hides the desire to run and burn the stages, that desire to be adults without really being one, which will transform the majority of you into unbearable and incomplete ones, precisely because you have denied and soon forgotten that thin and fragile sheet of dreams and hopes, that could have illuminated your whole life, you had been blind and so hypocritical to didn’t see and consider them true.

KiF Productions’ ode to the Passiflora is out now on Music To Watch Seeds Grow By – last remaining cassettes HERE.