Farolas y nieve

STREET LAMPS N' SNOW

Recorded at The Wendy House, Weddington, Autumn'81

... Promise was that I
Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver;
Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves ...

Cuando en 1980 el vocalista Martyn Bates y el multi-instrumentista Pete Becker se conocieron, el primero tenía entre manos una novela de Aldous Huxley cuyo título evocaba a su vez el pasaje citado arriba, procedente de la obra de John Milton Sansón Agonista. A Bates le pareció que el libro de Huxley despedía una hermosa sonoridad, e interesado por el mito de Sansón decidió adoptar el nombre de Eyeless in Gaza para bautizar la anómala banda inglesa que formó junto a Becker.

Al año siguiente estaban grabando experimentos en un club nocturno de Leeds, The Wendy House. Una de estas grabaciones, Street Lamps n' Snow, consistía en una suerte de improvisación simultánea que ambos ejecutaban por separado, de modo que cada uno apenas escuchaba lo que estaba haciendo el otro. El resultado, más tarde recuperado en el álbum de rarezas Orange Ice & Wax Crayons (1992), fue el siguiente...

Martyn Bates.- A piece recorded when we were very much under the spell of free music. This sort of thing was so refreshing to play and hear... quite a test, I remember; Pete was in the studio while I was in the kitchen... we were both playing to a tiny leakage... i.e., we'd practically no idea what the other one was doing!... Yeah, good idea... exciting!

Pete Becker.- It reminds me of wen you're a kid and it's xmas anda it's nightime; It's snowing and you're outside under the streetlamps... those sodium, orange ones... You look up and you just see the orange glow anda snow coming down and everything. But sometimes it looks like the snow's going around the light, or up, or down, or across... and you get this giddy feeling about you... and becouse of the time of year you feel there's a kind of magical quality about it. Which fits this piece of music exactly... except that it's got that tension between an innocent childkike quality and something that's a bit spooky and off-kilter... seems to be a recurring motif in Eyeless' music...