Belladonna Panorama is a new track that feels more like painting than music.
According to Wikipedia…
Belladonna is one of the most toxic plants found in the Western hemisphere. The berries pose the greatest danger to children because they look attractive and have a somewhat sweet taste.
The symptoms of belladonna poisoning include dilated pupils, sensitivity to light, blurred vision, tachycardia, loss of balance, staggering, headache, rash, flushing, dry mouth and throat, slurred speech, urinary retention, constipation, confusion, hallucinations, delirium, and convulsions.
Finished a new instrumental track over the holidays. I started on this not long after visiting a King Shiloh Sound System session last month, so there’s a lot of deep bass in the track.
Q: All I hear is a bottomless, sucking void?!
A: The bottomless, sucking void you’re hearing, that is where the bass should be, and you need better speakers.
In 2007, I was listening to Spanish radio RNE3 while driving through Spain last week. I was on my way home from Gibraltar, through Andalusia and Valencia, across the Sierra Nevada, along the Costa del Sol and the Costa Blanca. Mountains on my left, the sea on my right, the sun in my eyes. Then this tune came on.
I didn’t think much of it at first. It sounded like just another bit of smooth jazz elevator music. But then it wasn’t. The words drifted like waves in the ocean, constantly coming together and falling apart, sung in a voice not quite happy and not quite sad. It was as if the words sung themselves. And suddenly I could see. I could see the musicians, waiting, counting, nodding to the rhythm within, smiling, smoking, then taking their instruments and letting the music flow, as they had done so many times, and the tune opened up, like a crack in the sky. The music flowed out of the radio like thick creamy milk out of a cow.
I tried to catch the name of the performer or the song, but couldn’t understand any of the Spanish babble. So I wrote down as much of the lyrics as I could without driving the car off a cliff. That was just four words: “Stone”, “Stick”, “Riverbank” and “March”.
What are the odds? I didn’t expect to ever find the song. But it turns out to be a popular Brazilian tune called “The Waters of March”, written by Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim, and I found a few versions on YouTube.
The one I had heard is probably this version, in English, sung by Luciano Souza (the video seems to be a homemade holiday video):
