Ángel Ontalva is a Spanish guitarist who spends a great deal of time working in Russia whom we’ve featured here in the past, and he surprises us with a release of an album full of Rock-In-Opposition and chamber-rock influences.
From his Bandcamp site:
“The origin of this album is in the Rock In Opposition Festival 2014. For our participation I wrote new arrangements for some of the group’s compositions that, due to the difficulty of the scores and the lack of time to prepare them properly, were discarded. During these years I have fantasized about the idea of recording these versions and finally I decided to try to record one of the songs only with guitars. I liked the experiment so much that I decided to continue with a few more songs and in just over a week I have gathered the material that makes up this album.
The songs included here that come from those arrangements for the RIO Festival are Trapped in the sea ice (the first one I recorded), from our album Permafrost, Avanzando velozmente contra el viento lacerante (from Saturnal), Architeuthis Dux (from Charybdis) and Arena negra (from Isla Purgatorio). To the initial idea was added the recovery of some songs as I originally wrote them, different from how they appeared on the albums, such as the aforementioned Architeuthis Dux or Unknown Pilot, also from Charybdis.
This collection is completed with some of my favorite compositions by October Equus: Helgoland (Charybdis), Estelas (Presagios), Realidad ciega and Último refugio (Saturnal). In general, I think that the sound of this guitar ensemble accentuates the chamber music and intimate character of the compositions, and gives a very different, and perhaps surprising, perspective on the songs.”
The music gives new life to some of his older work, and he continues to branch out farther and farther into avant-progressive rock territory.
