Jano Córdoba, Argentina. Argentine Symphony Rock band.
Об альбоме (сборнике)
PARAPHRASIS (Insomnia of I-watches)
Paul and Ana Sofia SOFIA AND THE REVOLUTION
Menard, stubborn demiurge of the doubles, refers in his notes, a story in appearance simple and yet profoundly heretical in his structure. He affirms that thanks to that revolution, that elusive cataclysm, the viceroy, oscillating between the despotic and the tragic, fell out of favor and was judged not for his crimes, but for the silence he did not keep, and condemned, paradoxically, to exercise that silence until the end of his days. Punishment that was not sorrow but a subtle form of forgetting.
In the first days of the fall, beauty, that constant evanescent of history, and decency, its tenuous shadow, seemed to descend on the squares, on the walls still fresh of blood, and on the voices barely free. People, then, dreamed of a new world. Not a better world, which would have been naive, but a different world, perhaps parallel. But time, which does not omit his task of corroding, was fraying that promise, and between the seams of enthusiasm began to leak the tedium and disappointment that is the father of suspicion. Hopes were once again mentered with hopelessness, and no one knew whether the dream was that of freedom or that of its caricature.
In that ambiguous atmosphere was composed the then-famous “Ode of a Sunset”. Its author, anonymous by choice, bore witness to that time more with the voice of twilight than with that of singing. In the echo of that poem, Sofia was born when she died a peaceful afternoon. His name and his childhood, Menard tells us, spread like a garland that does not adorn, but envelops; it fluctuated cyclically, like the stations that return but are not the same, until it knocks on the same gates of hell. There, in that region without precise topography, his old age found abode.
Referring to this episode, Menard does not talk about history but about stories. His narration, and with it he also seems to allude to his own life. It is a kind of palimpsest. Not a document on which something new has been written erasing the above, but a surface where the old and the new coexist, the tacit and the explicit. In that palimpsest, the faint but not entirely indecipherable traces of the so-called post-revolutionary period must be guessed. We know, moreover – and this certainty is itself a form of irony – that the so-called “Ode of Dreams” is but a fortuitous, though not random, articulation of diverse stories, loose fragments of a time that was never a unit.
This album that the reader has before him, and that is perhaps rather a mirror, a paraphrase or even a betrayal, tells the story of Sofia and the revolution. But it does not do it like a linear narrative, but as a duplicate reflection, like the echo of a voice that was. It is, in the words of Menard himself, a paraphrase of “The Insomnia of the Clocks”, that apocryphal and fundamental text that serves as its postponed preamble, its anticipated sequel, its double displaced in time. Perhaps, and this is still disturbing, what is told here is not the story of Sofia, nor that of the revolution, but the incessant attempt to tell them but with music.
