Longtime friend of the blog Hector Javier Ayala collaborates with saxophonist Christophe Rieger to produce a slow, languid jazz album which has reference points in spaghetti western soundtracks and bossa nova, as well a touch of music from Mexico.
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Jeff Gburek’s recent instrumental guitar album is a a wonderfully disjointed trip around his sonic weapon of choice. It’s a truly wild work, but Jeff weaves his vast musical influences together with hints of a broken kind of blues, free jazz, improvisational skronk and psychedelic rock. In Jeff’s words, which you can read in full at Ramble Records‘ Bandcamp site: “In attempting to move into the future of the guitar or the post-guitar (as in the case of Kevin Drumm or Annette Krebs where the guitar became deconstructed and/or displaced into other electro-acoustic processes, if you will), I also discovered aspects…
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The Phonometrician is fellow Los Angeleno Carlos Morales, and he produces a music that sounds like a post-Industrial Coil supplemented by a very sparse acoustic guitar. It works quite well, and adds to the already immensely wonderful Lost Tribe Sound catalog.
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Fresh recordings have been delivered by Jeff Gburek, and there are a few more in the pipeline, apparently, so 2022 will be a busy year for one of the blog’s favorites. From Jeff’s Bandcamp site: “Five Broke Downe Homesick for the Open Road Medley Blues came to me as the title for tracks I recorded in October bounced off of various field recordings from the Summer 2022 . They are all recorded spontaneously at various locations. One can hear domestic and wilderness noises in the backgrounds (1), campfires, foxes or wolves, crickets (3). The tracks are mostly raw juxtapositions of…
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I can’t say I’ve heard of post-country music until today, but as it reminds me of post-rock, this is a genre that will definitely be worth exploring. Rivers Of Glass offer an instrumental album of shimmering guitar playing, sounding like an ambient music version of rain. It’s a sublime listening experience.
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Pharoah Sanders left this mortal coil on September 24, 2022, after leaving a stellar body of work and his influence on countless musicians including Jeff Gburek. The influence was profound, and you can hear it on this album, where the guitar glides into something free, not as in noisy free-jazz, but something free-floating, gentle, relaxing, almost heavenly. It certainly bears the stamp of his own work, and that of Sanders, but I hear also a touch of Sonny Sharrock in this mix as well. This is experimental music that is gentle on the ear and on the mind.
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The avant-garde music scene lost an incredible talent in the form of Jaimie Branch, who passed away on August 22nd at the age of 39. The blog’s friend, Noël Akchoté offers a lovely tribute album by transcribing the trumpeter’s work into works for solo acoustic guitar. It’s a raw album even by improv standards.
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Legendary King Crimson and David Bowie guitarist Adrian Belew returns with a brand new progressive rock album that emphasizes rock loudly. It sounds like a very complicated version of power-pop if the song a13 is any indication of what the rest of the album sounds like. The only off-putting thing is the VERY high price tag for what is a normal-sized album. The economy back home must be getting ever more brutal, I guess.
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This is the second guitar-based album we’ve had the pleasure of reviewing this week. This one comes from Mexican-French guitarist Hector (H.J.) Ayala who works out of Strasbourg, France. The album is a gentle, twangy, pleasantly meandering collection of tones which belong to a film which has not yet been made. Ayala continues to develop his mastery of the guitar and the ambience he brings to his compositions. Another solid release.
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Our friend and one of our perennial favorites at this blog, Jeff Gburek, comes to us with a mini-LP’s worth of meditative guitar music supplemented with an electro-acoustic bass berimbau, pine cones, and field recordings. There is an element of twangy, echoey, lo-fi music in these recordings which reminded me of the primordial, primitive guitar stylings of Robbie Basho or John Fahey blended with touches of American psychedelic folk as heard by bands such as Texas’ acid-folk legends Charalambides.