Alexander Graham Bell

On this day in 1876, 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for his revolutionary new invention--the telephone.

The Scottish-born Bell worked in London with his father, Melville Bell, who developed Visible Speech, a written system used to teach speaking to the deaf. In the 1870s, the Bells moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where the younger Bell found work as a teacher at the Pemberton Avenue School for the Deaf. He later married one of his students, Mabel Hubbard.

While in Boston, Bell became very interested in the possibility of transmitting speech over wires. Samuel F.B. Morse's invention of the telegraph in 1843 had made nearly instantaneous communication possible between two distant points. The drawback of the telegraph, however, was that it still required hand-delivery of messages between telegraph stations and recipients, and only one message could be transmitted at a time. Bell wanted to improve on this by creating a "harmonic telegraph," a device that combined aspects of the telegraph and record player to allow individuals to speak to each other from a distance.

With the help of Thomas A. Watson, a Boston machine shop employee, Bell developed a prototype. In this first telephone, sound waves caused an electric current to vary in intensity and frequency, causing a thin, soft iron plate--called the diaphragm--to vibrate. These vibrations were transferred magnetically to another wire connected to a diaphragm in another, distant instrument. When that diaphragm vibrated, the original sound would be replicated in the ear of the receiving instrument. Three days after filing the patent, the telephone carried its first intelligible message--the famous "Mr. Watson, come here, I need you"--from Bell to his assistant.

Bell's patent filing beat a similar claim by Elisha Gray by only two hours. Not wanting to be shut out of the communications market, Western Union Telegraph Company employed Gray and fellow inventor Thomas A. Edison to develop their own telephone technology. Bell sued, and the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld Bell's patent rights. In the years to come, the Bell Company withstood repeated legal challenges to emerge as the massive American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) and form the foundation of the modern telecommunications industry.

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Asobi Seksu

Nunca hemos dejado de atender a referencias que deambulan por las estancias sonoras que se hallan entre los pasillos etéreos del dreampop, los recovecos del noisepop, los habitáculos cósmicos del spacepop y los salones luminosos y expansivos del shoegaze. La lírica de las composiciones en los tratamientos más dulcificados del género (aunque no sólo), los susurros y las voces de ángeles que galopan sobre baterías nerviosas y guitarras reverberadas, placenteras y épicas; arrebatadas. Y cualquier tipo de arreglo y elemento decorativo que contribuye a potenciar la magia de este sonido. La mayoría de las veces que lo hacemos nos provoca un silencio súbito que nos invita poco a poco a contemplar con los oídos lo que empezamos a escuchar. Con este mismo reclamo regresan la pareja neoyorkina con su último largo recién editado. Hush, nos dicen. Y nosotros, sin rechistar, callamos y escuchamos.

Comenzamos así a explorar el álbum de Asobi Seksu o, lo que es lo mismo, el dúo formado por Yuki Chikudate y James Hanna (normalmente acompañados por William Pavone y Larry Gorman), el tercer elepé en su carrera. Y así vamos, de una sala a otra entre guitarras cristalinas, coros vocales, melodías afincadas en el dreampop que redecoran las vestiduras de un shoegaze apacible no falto de arreglos y efectos electrónicos. Doce espacios para doce canciones que nos van abriendo puertas desde la intensidad vocal del pop épico sostenido a teclados y baterías mecanizadas de Familiar Light o la dulce sinuosidad de Gliss, a dos voces, a las radiantes y diáfanas Sunshower, In The Sky y Mehnomae, contiguas al shoegaze de salón con su trono incluido de I Can’t See. Espacios llenos de destellos y distintas temperaturas lumínicas que, con más o menos regularidad y dueños de su propio estilo, celebran la calidad de un nuevo trabajo que se mueve entre los fantasmas de Slowdive, Mahogany, Pia Fraus y un sinfín más de shoegazers de una u otra escala, que invitan con gusto a quedarse. A entrar en el salón y conquistar el trono. Y a permanecer callado. Hush. Shhhhhh.

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