In the midst of a period of seriously bad atmospheric conditions, a sunny morning came out as I was rescuing old promos from boxes lying on the floor forever (that’s right, I still do it sometimes). In this case we are talking 2011, when I unpacked Someone Else’s Summer, which remained unheard until now. You have hopefully learned to understand the sorrow for neglecting – against my will – materials that may be extremely important for the sender at that time, and instead end up in undeserved obscurity and dust simply because the addressee receives an incalculable amount of them. This is yet another excuse to apologize, once again, to all of you whose releases suffered this offense.
Anyhow. This is a modest little gem, comprising three tracks. A fleeting arpeggiated rumination is followed by the title track’s 45 minutes of glimmering electric humming, presumably achieved via an eBowed guitar (*). Aficionados of the bewitching oscillation of contiguous harmonics are going to receive what they wish, the sound pervading the room with a mixture of Alvin Lucier-esque pulsation and tenuous dronage, only rarely complemented by sparse plucks. It’s really beautiful, exactly as the glimpse of blue sky unexpectedly appearing today. The final episode was recorded in Weathers’ house just hours before he started a long “drifting around” sketch; a cyclical percussive noise, perhaps coming from a ventilator or similar domestic appliance, is underscored by distant urban echoes. A looped normality turned into a soundtrack for a night preceding an undetermined future.
“As far as emotional content goes, the album is about isolation & not belonging. It’s about observing as an outsider” wrote Weathers, who honed his compositional skills at the University of North Carolina and the renowned Mills College. Those words – in addition to his unassumingly engrossing music – definitely find fertile ground in the analogous frame of mind of this reviewer, glad to have absorbed Someone Else’s Summer in the right moment. Eight years late.
(*) It’s actually a combination of guitars and sine waves, as Weathers explained via Twitter.
MASSIMO RICCI. TOUCHING EXTREMES. 