My fellow Californian Ernesto Diaz-Infante provides us with a warm, shimmering work of nine instrumental pieces composed solely for guitar. Each track is warm, not only by experimental music standards, but in terms of pure music listening. My particular favorite was IV, which reminded me of a hybrid between John Fahey and Roy Montgomery playing…
Tag: Guitar
Samo Salamon – Dolphyology: Complete Eric Dolphy for Solo Guitar
Our friend from Maribor, Slovenia, the fine guitarist Samo Salamon, graces our blog with a new release. This one is just him alone playing the works of Eric Dolphy accompanied by his guitar and, apparently, his cat adding in a meow or two. From Samo’s Bandcamp site: The idea of the project began by practicing…
Kawol Samarqandi and George Christian – Telegraph Paths
The Internet, for all the garbage one finds on it, amazes me some days. This album, a collaboration of a friend of the blog, George Christian (out of Brazil), collaborates with Kawol Samarqandi (based in Japan) and release this collection on a Spanish record label, Bestiar and an Australian label, Ramble Records. The world becomes…
Jeff Gburek – Works Within the Upright Ruins of the Kaszubian Piano, 2015/2021
Our first review on returning to Brno is a burner, naturally. Our friend, man of the world, and experimental music composer Jeff Gburek comes by these pages again with a droning masterpiece. This is not the ordinary drone you hear reviewed on these pages, though, truth be told, nothing I review is even remotely ordinary. …
Roy Montgomery – Roy Montgomery 40th Anniversary 2021 LP Series
I think it’s impossible to overestimate the important place Roy Montgomery has in the annals of New Zealand’s experimental rock scene. Thanks to his work on labels such as Kranky Records and Drunken Fish, he has quite a high international profile, and it helps that the music he’s produced for so many decades is nearly…
Santiago Fradejas – The Light Through The Springs
The guitar, all by itself, can serve as tool for making a haunting orchestra’s worth of sounds. My good friend Santiago Fradejas, now resident in Kent, of all places (!) presents a mini-LP’s worth of brooding, swelling, lilting soundscapes. There is a menacing element tying the album together, as though one was taking a stroll…
Cousin Silas – Dreamsville
Cousin Silas is one of my favorite guitarists, and I can’t think of many who are better at making such mellow soundscapes. This is one of his latest albums, and his massive body of work is consistently good. Really consider looking him up on Facebook and following his massive release schedule on Bandcamp.
Florian Arbenz, Hermon Mehari, Nelson Veras – Conversation #1: Condensed
Swiss drummer and percussionist Florian Arbenz was featured on our previous website, A Miscellany of Tasteful Music, some time in 2020 on a record he did with American saxophonist Greg Osby. This album is equally as engaging. This slightly unusual line up of guitar, trumpet & drums might, at first glance, miss a bass instrument….
稷廬 / jì lú – 山與客聽 / Mountain, Traveler, Listener
The Sichuan, China-based Jì Lú (稷廬) are a new project that has connections with one of China’s most innovated bands, Raflum. The instrumentation on this album is sparse, but it makes for good listening, as bamboo flute and guitar seem to blend pleasantly. Some notes regarding the release: When talking about landscapes in the traditional context, it’s mostly about reclusion. Although true recluses are rare, the mountains and rivers are always there. Ironically, the real landscapes are actually “horrible nature” instead of some leisure place. The traditional landscape paintings are a kind of “tame nature,” which were described as “To observe with meditation, and lie down to experience” and “Sitting in the forest and spring instead of go to banquet” by ancient Chinese poets. It emerge at North and South Dynasty, then become a game of finding the essence during the Five Dynasties and the Song Dynasty, and finally stuck in the static self-development after the Ming and Qing Dynasties. The development of landscape paintings are just like how people detach with the nature and entering urban life. This album is the continuation of this thesis. In a time when the virtual reality are replacing urban life, we attempt to reinterpret this cliche with improvisation that based on the topic of “landscape.” We also naming the songs by minutes and seconds instead of the traditional way of titling the songs, which is based on its imagery. That creates interactive between the “teller” and listener, and reflects the beauties for individuals due to their own aesthetic experiences. At this time, the distant, outmoded, cumbersome and vague image of landscape might leave a huge space for “starting again.” Instrumental by Liu Zhu (bamboo flute)…
Nicadrio Lee – Palette
Aloha Got Soul is a record label out of Hawaii documenting the lost soul that was coming out of the state during the 1970s and 1980s, but this release is actually the work of a local prodigy called Nicadrio Lee who put this album together last year if I understand correctly. It’s been hyped for…