The twelve chapters form a whole for the benefit of a Peter Gabriel album whose contours we have not yet finished defining.
Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised by anything with him anymore, but still. We really didn’t see this one coming. Peter Gabriel fan of Indochine and/or Mickey 3D to, in turn, um, ask the moon, and this every month since last January, that was still worth points, right? Enough jokes. It really doesn’t matter what might have made the gentleman want to coincide the birth of each stage of the project i/o with a new full moon.
He had his reasons, the explanations provided more or less half-heartedly were worth what they were worth. Real creative inspiration or nice marketing pirouette? Especially since, when someone explains to you that their first single (“Panopticom”) is based on the idea of launching the creation of a globe of data accessible and expandable to infinity – to quickly understand that this is not This will not necessarily be the most abstruse argument that he will deign to provide over the course of the year – something tells you that you will be quicker to form your own idea, at the moment and subsequently.
In any case, the main thing is elsewhere: to finally release a new, unreleased album from Peter Gabrieltwenty-one years after his predecessor, Up! Almost a generation… Until the press release which prefers to have fun by evoking a “slow gestation” (“lengthy gestation”, lengthy which can also be translated as “prolonged, slow, interminable, tedious”…). And because each chapter of this i/o new had the possibility of existing individually for at least the space of twenty-eight days, this is the way in which they exist together from now on, succeeding or responding to each other, enriching each other through contact with each other. Form an album, what; a notion that we quickly realize is something that Gabriel never lost sight of.
And as it is well known, the lit side of the moon would be nothing without its hidden side, two different arrangements (“Bright-Side Mix” and “Dark-Side Mix”) will not be too much. It is in particular this impression of waves in its sound construction, of tides and surf, which dominates, between electronics which also seem to want to refer to the eighties memories of a So (symbolized by this catchy “Road to Joy”) and rivers of strings less peaceful than disillusioned (irresistible “Playing for Time”).
That this feeling of intertwined past and present imposes itself as a constant in the perception of i/o is actually nothing surprising. Time appears there like a red thread. The time that flies, the time that we have not seen pass and that we regret not having been able to remember, the time in which we no longer really recognize ourselves by what it has created or destroyed, the time of which we worry about what he seems to announce.
Of this world that he seems to take care to look at with a distance while refusing to completely “self-exclude” from it, because he still wants to believe that he, like us, forms a whole (“I’m just part of everything”) , as he insists on the track giving its name to the album, Peter Gabriel continues to use it in order to extend the field of a universe like no other, even if it means raising our eyes and our goat towards the stars to move its borders a little further away.
Find this column on i/o by Peter Gabriel and many others in our issue 158, available on newsstands and via our online store.
