I find myself in 2024, again.
HiFi shows, like the recently attended Capital AudioFest 2025, are many things including a big disruptor of my daily routine. And if there’s one thing I like it’s a routine.
So I find myself in 2024, again, with this week’s pick from Brussels collective Pablo’s Eye and their enigma, er I mean album, The light was sharp, our eyes were open. An album inspired in part by Michelangelo Antonioni’s enigma, er I mean film, L’Avventura and more specifically words about it by Richard Skinner from his Vade Mecum Essays, Reviews & Interviews which the collective quotes in the notes to the album on Bandcamp:
A group of friends go sailing and one disappears. The others start searching for her. But it gradually becomes apparent that she won’t be found. So the friends return home one by one. Only the missing girl’s lover and her best friend remain.They have begun an affair. As the lovers come together the girl’s disappearance is all but forgotten.
From Michelangelo Antonioni — “Auteur of eerie angst” (L’Avventura) by Richard Skinner from Vade Mecum Essays, Reviews & Interviews (Zero books, 2015).
Words which weave their way into the lyrics of the track “The adventure.” But have no fear as you can just listen to The light was sharp… with your ears and let the rest of you follow along it’s lovely atmospheric, with teeth, ride. I hear, especially on album opener “Breezes were polar storms,” more than a touch of Vini Reilly and Durutti Column, a reference I always welcome, but things soon thereafter get purely Pablo’s Eye.