At Last! Gianni Marchetti's long sought-after Gimmick (1978)

Like the beautiful old Greek myth of Pandora's box that let out all the ills and evils for humanity, but at the bottom kept the Gods' gift of hope as a way to endure those calamities, for us, it is music that should have been placed at the bottom of the box-- so that we can face the tragedies of our lives with something beautiful and beyond this world, that takes us outside reality to a kind of human-made heaven.  Like I've said before, for us music-lovers, this is the closest we'll come to experiencing paradise.  Because it is created by the human heart, it speaks to us in a way no physical object can, because it is so supremely beautiful in such a nonconcrete way, divorced from the real things we smash into, but made from them nonetheless, it feels like we are intersecting with an imaginary world in a real slice cutting through the soul, directly touching our feelings like the hand of god...

I hate to disappoint everyone here but this album (information here) with so much hope (that 'thing with feathers') is here quite deplucked, after the brilliance of the Solstitium album we have a purely by-the-numbers library franchise, instead of the previous longest day of summer we have the winter nadir with about 17 hours of darkness to deal with.  A track called "Lagoon" is perhaps the closest we'll get to progressive songwriting of the 'April Orchestra 15' sort:





And don't ask me what the cost of investing in it was.