I am late—a conscious and partly culpable delay—in listening to and talking about Jeff Parker. Yet, this delay has the advantage of making the anticipation before discovery even more intense, like arriving at a landscape that had been hidden around a bend in the road. Perhaps, as sometimes happens, what truly strikes us waits for the right moment to reveal itself, as if time itself requires a precise alignment.

Jeff Parker: guitarist, composer, producer. A man, a figure, but above all, a horizon of sounds that expand and contract, mutate and renew themselves, always with the grace of someone possessing a rare awareness. Originally from Bridgeport, Chicago, Parker does not belong to a single musical domain. He traverses jazz, rock, electronics, and the shapeless territory of experimentation, weaving sonic threads that seem to emerge from an invisible loom.

His name inevitably evokes the Tortoise, the band that redefined the boundaries of post-rock, but his creative universe is far more expansive, dotted with solo works, collaborations, and ventures into the most diverse landscapes of contemporary music. I've always thought of Jeff Parker as, in some way, a possible evolution of jazz guitar: the ideal heir to Jim Hall, yet with a spirit that embraces not only the past but also the future.

His music is balance, a continuous dialogue between improvisation and composition, between acoustic and electronic, between tradition and innovation. He possesses the precision of one who knows the rules and the freedom of one who knows how to break them, blending the legacies of jazz with funk, soul, free jazz, and even hip-hop.

I stumbled upon Forfolks almost by chance, guided by a recommendation from Mary Halvorson in a video where she listed her favorite albums.

I bought it on trust, and I immediately found myself immersed in a work that is not just music but a place, a moment, a thought.

Forfolks is a solo album in which Parker weaves loops, overdubs, and guitar touches that seem to evoke meditative, repetitive landscapes—yet they are never monotonous. Eight tracks, some original, others reinterpretations, like windows into an inner world that gradually reveals itself.

There’s “Suffolk,” with its nocturnal breath, built on delicate repetitions and a silence that feels fuller than any sound. There’s “My Ideal,” which takes a jazz standard and transforms it into something intimate and personal, as if the notes themselves had absorbed the artist’s memories. And then there’s Four Folks, the heart of the album, whose simplicity unfolds as richly as an enigma. La Jetée is a temporal distortion, a play of layers that challenges perception, while Excess Success delivers a groove that creeps in slowly, almost stealthily.

Forfolks doesn’t reveal itself easily. Like a relic found in an old trunk, it seems to come from an undefined era: echoes of the past and prophecies of the future, a suspended bridge between the classic and the contemporary.

Loops blend with improvisations, ambient sound becomes an integral part of the music, as if Parker is conversing not only with his instrument but with the environment itself. Each track is a microcosm of details, choices, and nuances that reward the attentive and curious listener.

Forfolks is an album that defies the linearity of time. It is a sonic artifact that could sit among a stack of jazz classics, confusing listeners with its ability to be both contemporary and a relic. Every note, every loop, seems chosen with the precision of a gardener pruning to enhance the natural shape of things. There’s a subtle interplay between subtraction and fullness, between what is said and what remains suspended.

It is a work of subtraction, a reflection of what contemplative music in our time might be. Parker plays, immerses himself, explores, and shares. And we, on this side of the sound, find ourselves exploring with him, driven by the feeling that perhaps there is still much left to discover. Parker is a sound architect: with every touch of his strings, he seems to sketch a new fragment of a map where jazz, rock, electronic music, and experimentation converge like currents in a boundless sea.

This album doesn’t aim to dazzle—there are no virtuosic displays, no dramatic exclamations. It is a conversation, a dialogue with the listener and with the space that surrounds it. Like certain works of fiction, Forfolks isn’t meant to be rushed but requires slow attention, a gaze that lingers on the details and lets them resonate.

Jeff Parker, with his ability to create musical landscapes that are both personal and universal, offers us a journey—a journey that traverses time, space, and emotion.

Epic. Ethical. Progressive. Adrenaline-pumping. Apocalyptic. Integrated. Godspeed You! Black Emperor are one of the cult bands in the global independent scene, with an unbreakable reputation that for thirty years has allowed them to move forward in the production of epic, long and instrumental compositions, with a visceral passion for an atmospheric sound that blends elements of experimental rock, drone, progressive and orchestral music. I have been following their exploits since their first LP F♯ A♯ ∞ (1997) characterized from the very beginning by a dark and minimalist atmosphere, with tracks that seem to describe a post-apocalyptic landscape. A trademark that has never abandoned each of their new releases since then.

Their new album “"NO​ ​TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28​,​340 DEAD", released on October 4, 2024, yet another chapter in their epic and ethical saga. What does "NO​ ​TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28​,​340 DEAD" offer? Very little, or rather almost nothing to what we already know and what we have heard in all their previous works: GY!BE do not change much of what we have long been consistently accustomed to, maintaining with granite coherence, their stylistic figures, which I am going to list and update here again.

GY!BE's sound is characterized by complex and layered arrangements, often built around emotional crescendos. The main instruments include electric guitars, bass, violin, cello, percussion, and sometimes tapes and audio samples. Their compositions, which can exceed 20 minutes, are structured as suites, divided into movements that explore different dynamics and sonic themes. The durations of their pieces bring them closer to both instrumental pieces for chamber ensembles, and to the cosmic rides of Hawkwind, and to the progressive suites and sonic storms of Glenn Branca, and express a certain kinesthetic taste very similar to Morricone's dark soundtracks, those connected to the soft-porn and violent police B-movies of the '60s and '70s.

The band's music is often described as cinematic, evocative and apocalyptic. Often accompanied by visual projections during concerts, their art expresses a strong sense of social and political urgency, dealing with themes such as the collapse of civilization, oppression, and hope for a better future.

In this sense, Godspeed You! Black Emperor have profoundly influenced the post-rock scene and beyond, thanks to their unique vision and dedication to art as a tool for political resistance. Their music has been used in films, documentaries and contexts that require a strong emotional impact, consolidating their role as sonic narrators of our time. In their music, you can notice the absence of real sung parts; when they appear, the voices are fleeting, incomprehensible, cold and dark, often recited and filtered through the hauntological instrument of a radio tuned to a dead channel. Ghost voices, whispers that pass through the walls.

And then the epic, which they manage to insert into every song. They usually start slowly, with the introduction of static taken from radios drugged by white noise and then explode into an energetic sound wave that is nothing short of electrifying, making them forgive some shortcomings in the harmonic construction of the tracks.

Also, don't forget the particular layout of their CDs. Look at the photos of their albums. Their booklets and the cardboard boxes themselves show a particular taste for a certain design that seems sloppy and casual, but which instead betrays a careful study and an intelligent reworking of blurred black and white images, texts typed on an old typewriter, brown or semi-transparent paper.

Everything is always very hauntological, but with a strong, very strong, progressive component. Maybe they were also in the first four albums, but the sound has, for some time, taken on this very strong connotation, which is supported by the layering of pure sound. Of the historical prog groups, perhaps they only show some chamber assonances with King Crimson. Genesis and Peter Gabriel are light years away. It is a stylistic trademark, but there is no trace of baroque suites adorned with kilometre-long solos, the improvisational component remains an important detail as well as the love for noise and distortion. They create dense electrical storms, layered clouds of sound reminiscent of Glenn Branca's symphonies that move within the songs, speeding them up, slowing them down, generating dynamics and pauses charged with static electricity waiting for a resolution that is often masterfully postponed.

Their latest albums are very similar to each other, yes, some have a darker component, others like the latest, seem to sparkle in comparison, almost exude a painful hope in response to the social and political climate of the contemporary world, but they all have the same starting matrix, the same musical yeast. I didn't expect anything new from this latest "G_d's Pee AT STATE'S END!" and so it was. The Black Emperor remains on his throne. Granitic. Aesthetic. Proud.

So why buy this latest album if I don't register any real sign of a stylistic evolution? What's the point of listening to a band that continues to replicate itself, providing only small signs of difference between one album and another? Because I love them. They won me over, they took my soul. The truth is that the Black Emperor has been able to create a sound spell so sophisticated, ductile, malleable and immersive that you can no longer do without it. I've been waiting for this album for a long time. The Black Emperor knows how to intelligently ration his releases with precision and perfect marketing sense. He takes care of his albums with obsessive attention to detail. He evokes a sound that is not irrelevant. I can't resist. I buy and listen regardless. I've even stopped telling myself that it will be the last time, because I already know that I will buy the next one too. Long live the Black Emperor! Long live GY!BE.

“Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition,...Both a gift and a trap.”

William Gibson, Pattern recognition, pag. 23

Contemporary classical guitar music disorients me. This musical niche manages to combine some curious and apparently out of time aspects, uniting a creative attitude typical of classical music (the separation and specialization of two distinct figures: the composer and the performer) with an idea of the classical guitar that is very different from both its “classical” and its “popular” role. I think this disorientation towards contemporary classical guitar music is easily understandable: it is a musical niche that subverts many of the traditional expectations related to the instrument and its function. This genre seems to occupy a unique territory, in which tensions between the past, the present and an uncertain future coexist.

This post was built around some reflections matured through listening to an excellent contemporary music CD: “Turning Page”, the work of the Italian guitarist Lorenzo Biguzzi and produced by the independent record company Stradivarius in 2023. This CD places particular attention on six pieces, the work of six Italian composers, composed over a period of almost sixty years and requires, in addition to a dutiful praise towards the composer and the performer, a pause for reflection to better analyze this musical niche.

One of the most distinctive aspects of classical music, which persists even in its contemporary declination, is the separation of the figures of composer and performer. This approach is rare in the guitar, which in the popular tradition or even in fields such as jazz and more experimental forms linked to ambient and sound art, tends to unite these two figures. In contemporary classical guitar music, however, the performer often finds himself working with extremely complex musical material, written by composers who explore unconventional performance techniques, microtones, percussion on the body of the guitar or the use of different forms of preparation of the instrument.

The contemporary classical guitar also challenges traditional notions of the instrument: it is not “classical” in the traditional sense, because it often renounces the lyrical and melodic repertoire associated with figures such as Segovia or Tárrega, to embrace a more experimental and dissonant aesthetic. It is not “popular”, because it distances itself from the immediate, accessible and rhythmic language that characterizes the guitar in folk or pop genres.

Instead, the guitar in this context becomes a sort of sound laboratory, in which the timbric research and the technical possibilities of the instrument are pushed to the limit. It is an instrument that, while maintaining a strong individual and intimate imprint, opens up to a complexity that often requires a more analytical than emotional listening. A forge of prototypes and models of thought.

In this sense, contemporary music for classical guitar belongs neither to the past nor to the future, but is situated in a continuous present of exploration. This makes it fascinating, but also not very accessible: it requires the audience to abandon predefined categories and accept uncertainty as part of the experience. Perhaps the disorientation I feel is precisely the sign of its artistic strength: this music forces me to rethink what I thought I knew about the instrument, about the roles of those who play or compose it, and about how to listen to it. Every time I listen to this CD I feel the need to approach each piece as if I had never listened to one, thus escaping the narrative that each of us assembles, consciously or unconsciously, from the moment of first listening. It is true, homo sapiens is linked to the recognition of thought patterns. A gift and a trap at the same time, writes William Gibson.

At the same time, since this is contemporary music, experimentation, you wonder what future it is trying to express. This music reflects a deeply contemporary vision of time and uncertainty. The "future" as previous generations understood it, a relatively stable and predictable horizon, has become an elusive idea in our era. The speed of technological, social and environmental changes has made the present so unstable that a long-term narrative cannot be built with the same solidity as in the past.

We live in a context in which continuity is replaced by fragmentation and improvisation, where the ability to navigate a chaotic present becomes more important than imagining a distant tomorrow. This music offers, instead, not a pessimistic observation, but an invitation to rethink our relationship with time and change: if we can no longer build the future as a linear projection, perhaps we can rebuild it through continuous innovation and resilience.

No listening, no music, no trends. What I am trying to identify with this blog is a pattern of group behavior around a particular class of music. I am trying to recognize a pattern before anyone else. After all, the future is always there, looking back at us, and I am trying to trace a thread in the story that could be.

“We have no future because our present is too volatile.We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.”

William Gibson, Pattern recognition, pag. 48

A classic, wrote Italo Calvino, has never finished saying what it has to say. And metaphor is one of the 'classic' elements of our way of communicating. The Encyclopedia Britannica brings us back to this definition of 'metaphor': “a figure of speech that implies a comparison between two unlike entities, as distinguished from simile, an explicit comparison signalled by the words like or as.” Immediately after, it adds, for greater precision, like: “The distinction is not simple. A metaphor makes a qualitative leap from a reasonable, perhaps prosaic, comparison to an identification or fusion of two objects, the intention being to create one new entity that partakes of the characteristics of both. Many critics regard the making of metaphors as a system of thought antedating or bypassing logic.”

Luca Perciballi, on his website, defines himself as a guitarist, composer and electroacoustic musician. His musical path is a perfect expression of what is happening in the world of experimental music in these times, Luca in fact manages to effectively combine both the activity of improviser and composer, moving with ease between these two worlds, which, once, were considered rigidly separated from each other. His work is focused on instrumental practice and on a compositional approach (traditional and electroacoustic) that starts from a performative gesture. Perciballi pursues a research where the musical material is dominated by sound as an organoleptic agent and related to a dense network of references and memories. His sound has been distinguished, for some time now, by an undeniable personal imprint, to be characterized by a sign characterized by an elaborate game built on semiological metaphors.

In her essay “On Style,” Susan Sontag wrote: “To speak of style is one way of speaking about the totality of art. Like all discourse about totalities, talk of a style must rely on metaphors. And metaphors mislead.”

She was right. Metaphors are deceptive. What interests me most in Luca Perciballi’s music is the sensation of sensing a sort of purification from metaphor. It’s true, metaphor is essential for thought, but, Sontag writes, one should use it without believing in it too much, knowing that it is a necessary fiction, but one that should not be exaggerated. I formally detest those who use style, their own style, as something decorative, an accessory. I appreciate those who do not hide a personal, extremely complex style, with a deliberately ambiguous and light attitude.

Luca Perciballi recently released a new album: “Sacred Habits,” released by the independent label Kohlhass.

With his guitar and his minimal sounds, which betray sacred habits, Perciballi seems to suggest that style is a question of more or less (i.e. quantity), of thick and thin (i.e. density). “Sacred Habits” shows us how music, experienced as music, is an experience, not a declaration or the answer to a question. Music, any music, is not about something, but is something. “Sacred Habits” induces contemplation, a dynamic contemplation. This album contains information of all kinds, shows us new attitudes and implies the metaphor of music as a kind of nourishment. But, at the same time, it is also a vibrant and exemplary object that returns us to the world, more open and enriched, to lead us to listen or to understand something singular, not to judge or generalize.

Perciballi has long belonged to that small group of guitarists who love to transform the sound of their instrument, to the point of completely forgetting not only its sonic origins, but above all its musical and cultural references. His attention to the sense of space contributes to the creation of a musical vision that leads to an augmented sound art, a sort of Ryoji Ikeda on steroids. In “Sacred Habits” he shows us how style in music coincides with the principle of decision, the signature of an artist’s will. And just as human will is capable of an infinite number of positions, so for music there is an infinite number of possible styles, even within the same musician.

I was saying that on his website Luca Perciballi defines himself as a guitarist, composer and sound designer, it is a very intelligent and very real definition: his way of playing seems to me to be an attempt to bring improvisation, composition, every dimension of the sound of the electric guitar into a more concentrated state and, at the same time, less limited and constrained. Perciballi seems to seize every opportunity, both in the traditional and in the innovative sense, to search for, to find an open and never definitive modification of what is already known. His music is continually changing and searching for something new, it is never fixed and is too elusive for precise analysis and description. I find distressing what seems to be the usual practice of writings on academic music, which treat contemporary, experimental music as a sort of special musical activity practically segregated and I refuse to consider an experimental musician as a specialist in new music, almost as if music, to be normal and not specialized, must be configured as a sort of sound archaeology. I am sincerely grateful to him for this mental and musical openness. Thanks again, Luca Perciballi.

Links

Luca Perciballi – Guitarist- Composer- Sound artist

Kohlhaas

Bruce Chatwin in “Anathomy of Restlessness“ wrote, I believe rightly, that: “Art, like language, is a communication system. But unlike language it overrides linguistic and cultural barriers. Show an Eskimo to Velazquez and he will ignore it at first. But he can also learn to master its finer points far quicker than he can the sonnets of Gongora. 'Art', as Chesterton once said, 'is the signature of man.' Moreover, an art style is the signature of a particular man and a window on to the age in which he made it.”

Silvia Cignoli has stood out, for some time now, for her undeniable ability to imprint a personal 'signature' on her music, a semantic sign that is based on an elaborate game of semiological allegories. Classical and electric guitarist, experimental musician, composer and sound artist, she ranges from classical to contemporary music, from radical improvisation to avant-rock, creating a mix between her academic training and the underground electronic scene. Cignoli is a very particular musician, she knows how to use her instrument as a sound generator aimed at colonizing space, and she was able to break away from her personal artistic training by becoming an interpreter of an electronic sound aimed at overcoming the limits of the sustain of the electric guitar.

She recently released a new work: “Allegory of Earth and Water”, by the Italian independent label Rohs! Records, founded by Andrea Porcu in 2007.

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines allegory as: “allegory, a symbolic fictional narrative that conveys a meaning not explicitly set forth in the narrative. Allegory, which encompasses such forms as fable, parable, and apologue, may have meaning on two or more levels that the reader can understand only through an interpretive process. (See also fable, parable, and allegory.)

If allegory is the story of an action that must be interpreted differently from its literal meaning, in her album “Allegory of Earth and Water”, Silvia Cignoli’s allegory explicitly refers to Earth and Water, two of the basic elements of life, two elementary forms, and represents them in a metaphorical, allegorical way, moving with sinuous elegance between moments of ascetic composure and periods of hypnotic, disconcerting, and psychedelic changes. Silvia Cignoli’s guitar sound encompasses a huge dynamic and material range, from tinkling chords to expansive drones, from crystalline clarity to confused saturation.

“Allegory of Earth and Water” seems to be a perfect match where desires, anxieties, fears and a sense of general estrangement coexist in a form of compact elegance, capable of giving peace to Mark Fisher’s pessimism. This album is a fluid narration, which gives us the illusion of a mysterious suspension or violation of the irritating limits of time, space and natural laws that have always imprisoned us, frustrating our desire to expand the limits of our understanding. At the same time, “Allegory of Earth and Water” does not forget to speak to our emotional and dreamlike side, forcing us to listen carefully, ready to grasp its nuances, passages and connections. It is a sort of new optimistic gothic novel that leads us towards an expanded sensation of what is in our world.

“Allegory of Earth and Water” is based on a personal narrative that seems to anticipate one of the pressing needs of our era. It seems, in fact, that the potential of language is now running out, drowned in a sea of ​​communication based on memes, instantaneous soluble narratives and on what Mark Fisher defined as “low intensity entertainment”, incapable of truly satiating and capable of keeping the consumer on the rope, like a bag of chips. The opaque and glossy world of social networks, where public space has been removed in favor of advertising. Our society and culture need to return to narrating, in a complex, systematic and constructive way. This music, this guitar does not speak to us of nostalgia for modernism, but of a new perspective, of a form of constructive hope. Listen.

Links:

Silvia Cignoli musician

Music | rohs! records

Erkan Oğur (born April 17, 1954) is a Turkish musician. Pioneer of fretless guitars, he invented the first fretless classical guitar in 1976. As a composer, he influenced many musicians with his works, especially soundtracks, combining the sounds of classical music with ancient traditional music and Turkish folk music . He has performed all over the world and is considered a master of kopuz and bağlama lutes.

Erkan Oğur was born on April 17, 1954, in Ankara, Turkey. He spent his childhood in Elazığ, in eastern Turkey, where he became interested in the Turkish violin and lute bağlama, and began to study them assiduously. He graduated from Elazığ high school, then moved to study physics at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Ankara from 1970 to 1973, then went on to study chemical engineering and in 1974 he continued his education at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, Germany, for three years. He started studying the guitar in 1973, deciding to become a professional musician and since he could not get the right sounds to be able to play Turkish melodies, in 1976 he modified his guitar inventing the classical guitar without frets. In 1980, he returned to Turkey and started studying at the Istanbul State Conservatory. After military service, he continued his career as a musician, releasing his first album in Germany called Arayışlar ("Research"). In 1989, he traveled to the United States to work with numerous local blues artists, most notably Robert "One Man" Johnson, introducing the fretless guitar into the blues. A year later, he released his first album in Turkey, Bir Ömürlük Misafir ("A Lifetime Guest"), which was quite successful. He is a member of Telvin's trio, which mainly plays Turkish folk music in improvised jazz style, with İlkin Deniz and Turgut Alp Bekoglu, and released an album called Telvin in 2006. His soundtrack for the 2004 film Yazı Tura by Uğur Yücel it has won two awards: the Golden Orange 2004 for best music at the Golden Orange Film Festival in Antalya and the 2005 prize for best music at the Ankara International Film Festival.

Oğur's contributions gave musical substance to many commercial productions in the burgeoning Turkish pop scene in the '80s, but it was up to a German radio producer, Birger Gesthuisen, to track him down and give him the opportunity to record a solo CD. (There was an earlier cassette, released in 1983, which received only a small distribution.) Fretless (Feuer und Ice FUEC 714) was released in 1993 and gave Erkan's solo career a decisive boost. Until then it was held in high esteem by the musicians themselves, but his name was like a trade secret. A cult name.

In addition to extraordinary music, it contains a German presentation edited by Gesthuisen himself and the titles of the songs in English, things often missing on Turkish CDs. On the CD there is also the presence of the French jazz guitarist Philip Catherine.

Most of the tracks on that first CD were later reorganized and, together with other tracks, were released in Turkey (2000) under the title of Bir Ömürlük Misafir (Kalan 184).

The fretless guitar is clearly visible on the cover, as well as the splendid duet with Philip Catherine on Ağırlama, ("Hey Onbesli" a melody from East Anatolia).

On both records the listener can fully appreciate the extraordinary sound of the fretless instrument and Erkan's unique style: an excellent antidote to the postcard-like stereotypical image of Turkish music given by hundreds of belly dance discs.

"Neden Geldim Istanbul'a" (Why did I ever come to Istanbul?) gives a taste of the majestic rhythms and noble lines of Turkish "artistic"songs, while the lyrics of the track that gives the title to the disc are by Sezen Aksu, the queen of Turkish pop. Another interesting track is Sis, a composition by Mikis Theodorakis, from the first soundtrack of the film composed by Erkan and keyboard player Aydın Eysen, more often associated with a brilliant electric brand of jazz fusion, which here he makes an unexpected appearance.

After the release of Fretless, Erkan has participated in numerous projects by other artists and has released a series of CDs on the Kalan label as leader or co-leader: Gulun Kokusu Vardi (Kalan 86) in 1998; the following year Hiç (Nothing), with the saz / cure player Okan Murat Öztürk, (Kalan 135); in 2000 Anadolu Beşik (Kalan 178) and the soundtrack of Eskıya (Kalan 188), a film by Yavuz Turgul. Oğur was also invited to play on the CDs of Okan Murat Öztürk's group, Bengi.

Another excellent opportunity to listen to Erkan Oğur's music is given by the two CDs, "Gülün Kokusu Vardı" from 1998 and "Bilinmeyenle Karşılaşmak" from 2017, both played with İsmail Hakkı Demircioğlu, bass player and Turkish baglama.

I am not an expert in traditional makam music, but I have the impression that in these records the music expresses and moves more in the wake of tradition, compared to the two solo records. Oğur makes more use of the kopuz, an ancient long-necked stringed instrument, without frets, similar to other Turkish stringed instruments such as the lute and used in Central Asian music.

They are two excellent records, also characterized by the sung parts.

Fuad, published in October 2001 (Kalan 231) represented the possibility for Erkan Oğur to increase his musical profile and his international popularity.

This extraordinary record is the result of a beautiful collaboration with Djivan Gasparyan, the Armenian duduk player who won numerous awards all over the world. Supported by a small group of carefully chosen musicians, including the emerging kemençe player Derya Türkân and a percussion group led by longtime collaborator Ferruh Yarkın, Oğur has produced a CD to which the listener can return several times, discovering something new every time.

he repertoire is based on traditional melodies from eastern Turkey and Armenia, with some original pieces by Erkan himself. However, an academic or strictly philological interpretation should not be expected, since these songs enjoy the personal interpretations developed by these artists, deeply rooted in their traditions, but at the same time very open to a contemporary vision. Production does not shy away from modern technological improvements. The CD captures all the stamped nuances of string and wind instruments and preserves their dynamics in the mixing phase. Furthermore, Oğur overturns two or more plucked string instruments, allowing himself to play the melody, the accompaniment and the solo, sometimes in duet with himself, with the exact sound mix he had in mind.

One of the guitars illustrated in the booklet that accompanies the CD is a double-necked model, one with the keyboard, the other without frets, which allows Oğur to move quickly between the two musical worlds. It also uses ebow, so you can better produce the variety of microtonal sounds reminiscent of the complex Makam system. Throughout the CD, it presents improvised preludes from free time, giving way to extraordinarily beautiful melodies which in turn inspire eloquent solos, the vocal timbres of kemençe and duduk alternate with the delicate figures of kopuz and guitar.

Erkan Oğur, in his records, plays mainly the fretless classical guitar, a very particular instrument also because it has undergone various vicissitudes: the soundboard is broken, the neck is broken. Despite these drawbacks, he continues to use it because of its unique unique sound and its particular timbre. The guitar was damaged in 1991 in New York at the airport, where Erkan Oğur had gone for an interview with Guitar Player magazine. He put the guitar near the wall in its soft case and a huge trunk fell on it from a cart. Due to these traumas the sound had changed, with a reduced sound volume, but strangely, now it has a longer sustain, although it seems that Erkan Oğurnon has not yet understood why, since he continues to use it now the neck has been redone new and the body repaired. It is an old Spanish classical guitar, only a village guitar, not a well-known manufacturer.

It is a necessary instrument for those who want to play Turkish and Makam music, since it moves outside the temperate system typical of western music. Oğur believes that even if the Turkish system is not perfect, it adapts better to the real frequencies produced by a string if divided into parts and plucked. According to Oğur, the Turkish system is better because the tones move, unlike the so-called circle of fifths in western harmony. Makam music cannot be played with well-tempered instruments. Some notes of some makams can be played, but a makam is not just a scale or just a combination of quarters or fifths. A makam cannot be placed on a temperate scale: a makam moves the quarters or fifths in a special logic, in a special combination. Like Erkan Oğur's music.

References:

http://www.rootsworld.com/interview/ogur.html

https://www.discogs.com/it/artist/847864-Erkan-O%C4%9Fur

What is the natural role of an essayist dedicated to research music, in this post-covid society? A mere archivist role? An active collector? A resigned archaeologist?

I believe that our times have exhausted the ambition to operate contextually to the project of a new society and a new music, marking a narrower horizon and a more precise field of action. In this area the committed intellectual gives way to a restless expert, with eccentric sagacity, with unsatisfied curiosity, who nevertheless keeps away from any aestheticism, and does not give up the persuasion that the boundaries of musical experience must remain as open as possible. Having lost the compass of a historical goal to strive for, the vitality of culture is identified with the refusal to settle, to rest on deceptive compromises, illusory goals, acquired values; with the continuous tension to ceaselessly renew visual angles, listening and prospective syntheses.

It is no coincidence that the most iconic representation of this attitude re-elaborates the (inevitably Borgesian) image of the musical library, investing equally the roles of the writer and the listener: the essayist-character is also, and perhaps first and foremost, an attentive and curious listener. Whoever places his attention in research music is hunting for the hidden, distant record that changes the value of already known and consolidated listening, looking for the tension towards the new apocryphal text to be rediscovered or invented.

However, the non-identification with the events in progress remains strong, and this is the decisive distinction. The authority of the essayist is not based on the ability to explain a historical dynamic, to illustrate a route traveled or to be traveled, but on the careful recognition of conceptual nodes that serve as points of reference, as terms of measurement. The linear scheme of the journey gives way to a more complex topography. We could say, roughly, that the chronological development is replaced by a paradigmatic orientation. Meta-cultural ghosts have long since taken over, mixing things in the matrix of the world and in a stratified multiplicity.

At the same time, another image intervenes to compete with the essayist in the white coat, and in some ways constitutes his necessary complement: the archaeologist. Apparently, the archaeologist's point of view is opposite to that of the essayist: if the latter elaborates completed structures, the former goes in search of remains, residues, ruins; if one projects himself towards the future by manipulating formulas and semiological traces, the other pursues the vestiges of the past by deciphering traces and exhuming relics. Yet the archaeologist also deals with the present, a fragmented and confused present, to be read as a stratigraphic cross-section. Secondly, the interest in systems, codes, models does not diminish: it is only the other side of the investigation of archaeological finds in the light of an estranged and renewed listening.

Those who seek the new must take on the ghosts of post-modernist combinatorial mechanisms, because the game of permutations includes the possible discovery of the unexpected, the emergence of the unconscious, the germinal spark of myth: the broken mesh that does not hold, in short, the error in the design of the cultural fortress. The mythopoetic force of music itself is one with its ability to follow itineraries that skirt and overcome the barriers of interdictions, which lead to saying what could not be said, to an invention that is always a re-invention of sounds and stories that had been removed from collective and individual memory. It is a question of starting a process of imperfect codification, which incessantly refers to a beyond, to a further elaboration, to a new cultural anthropological horizon, in which music should return to fulfill a decisive role: music as a space of meanings and forms that are valid not only for music itself.

These two figures are joined by a third: the collector, the incarnation of a systematic mentality applied, rather than to abstract models or elements, to concrete entities, full of history and contingency. CDs, LPs of little or no value, if taken individually: which however a certain succession and distribution can reveal to be the custodians of interesting connections and intuitions. Hence the importance of the idea of ​​a physical collection, of a musical library, of a disco of sound simulacra. In rhetorical terms, a collection is a particular type of synthesis between singularity and plurality: the same position or syntactic function that reproduces and divides itself into an indefinite quantity of different elements. Thus, the same gaze rests on an indefinite series of perspectives, dimensions, experiences, in an effort that is always provisional and yet never useless to reduce a fragmented and disintegrated reality to a complete and unitary sense. Even in this horizon, therefore, there always remains the possibility of narrating; it will essentially be stories of the audible, woven on the boundary between idea and perception, between listening and theorizing, in the name of perpetual mobility.

The result of this triad of different personalities is a rather solitary and withdrawn figure. An expert who does not dance about architecture, a man of culture, who nevertheless keeps away from the diatribes of insiders and indeed prefers to deal with topics without boasting any specialist competence; a character who does not aspire in the first instance to qualify his own time, but always speaks from well-defined places, variously eccentric and marginal. And, above all, an observer intent on describing and examining what he listens to, who carefully chooses objects capable of stimulating the sonic faculties, restoring their original speculative force.

A character, a blogger, who draws his authority as an essayist not from the intelligence of historical processes, but from the examination of appearances, that is, from the interrogation of objects, places, phenomena. Having put aside the presumption of being one of the creators of the future society, having set aside the prerogatives of those who move within their own field, the blogger reasonably chooses to escape the cage of specialisms and predetermined functions, and to wear the clothes of the amateur, strong in the reactivity of those who come across this or that aspect of reality for the first time: of the tourist of culture, who avoids the most obvious destinations, makes a thousand discoveries and intuits a thousand possible fixations, without ever stopping on any, faithful to a vocation of wandering "scrutator", of curious and restless of the sound universe.

Enjoy listening and reading on Neuguitars.

The term "cult" is an ontological shorthand that indicates an exceptional and timeless status. When talking about records, this attribute is often linked to factors such as the quality of the musicians and their rarity, as in the case of the album Kaitaiteki Kokan (sometimes also written as Kaitai Teki Kokan), recorded by the duo Masayuki Takayanagi and Kaoru Abe. The title, which can be translated into English as Deconstructed Exchange or Deconstructive Empathy, explicitly refers to both the music contained in the record and the situation that is created on stage when two musicians exchange ideas and "deconstruct" them on a continuous basis.

Behind this CD, recently reissued, the "cult" factor, its exceptional status is reflected both on a material and emotional level. The album was released in 1970 in Japan, in only, it is said, 100 copies. It is one of the rarest albums ever, it is very rarely offered at auction and has never been traded on Discogs.com. It is rumored to have sold for a maximum price of 4000 US dollars. It is therefore an obscure collector's item for true fanatics. But that is not all. This album shows an equally important status as a form of artistic expression, this is because it is one of the most radical demonstrations of free jazz music, not only Japanese.

The album was recorded by two Japanese musicians known for their extreme positions: Masayuki Takayanagi (高 柳 昌 行) - electric guitar and Abe Kaoru (阿 部 薫) - saxophone. The album was recorded live, during the concert held on June 28, 1970 at the Kōsei Nenkin Kaikan hall in the city of Shinjuku. Masayuki Takayanagi also appears as a record producer, while the sound engineer is Kozuo Kenmochi. In addition to the saxophone, Abe Kaoru also plays the bass clarinet and harmonica.

MASAYUKI TAKAYANAGI, born December 22, 1932 in Tokyo. He began his professional career in 1951. He founded his first of many groups called New Direction in 1954. From then on, he was a key member in almost every avant-garde musical group in Japan. Takayanagi was a true outsider, never being taken into consideration by the mainstream music press. He died on June 23, 1991.

ABE KAORU was a Japanese free jazz musician and saxophonist, known not only for his music, but also for his wild and wild life and for his wife, Suzuki Izumi, a popular science fiction novelist. He was born on May 3, 1949 in Kawasaki, Kanagawa District. He left school at age 17, moving to Shinjuku, a city that then, as now, seems to have been something of a center for counterculture and a welcoming environment for the kind of music he would go on to play. Entirely self-taught, he made his debut at age 19, eventually developing a unique technique on the saxophone. His playing was strongly rooted in the hours he spent practicing alone; most of his recordings and performances are solo (this seems to have been due to his tendency to literally play over potential collaborators), leading to his reputation as a rather "selfish" musician. The normal pattern for Japanese jazz musicians was to study with older professionals, practice regularly with other musicians, and eventually make their professional debut. Abe broke these rules from the start. He died on December 9, 1978 in Nakano (a district of Tokyo), of a drug overdose.

The album Kaitaiteki Kokan (Kaitai Teki Kokan) was originally released in 1970 as an LP. The first reissue was produced in 1999 by the DIW record label, while a few additional copies of the reissue were released a year later. In 2017, the record label Craftman Records, which specializes in reissues of Japanese albums, mainly jazz, released the first reissue on 180g black vinyl.

The CD you see in the photos is a very elegant “mini LP”, a replica of the vinyl version, with a cover in beautiful black paper with silver letters. In order not to alter the graphic composition, the OBI has also been reduced. The disc was pressed using the Ultimate HighQualityCD (UHQCD) technology, an improved version of the HQCD. The intensity of the music is overwhelming and, literally, hits you in the head like a baseball bat, so the technical aspect of the musical message, the quality of the sound, becomes less important in my opinion. The reissue of the album Kaitaiteki Kokan, in fact, was not made using the analog master tape or its digital copy, but directly from an LP, with a technique called “needle drop”. Listening to the CD with headphones you will hear an imperceptible background noise: it seems that the disc has been remastered with the aim of eliminating high-frequency components and noises, but without completely removing the noise. The instruments are recorded from a certain distance, have little volume and the frequencies are concentrated in the mid-range. Their sound is penetrating, including the harmonic that enters in the first minute of the second track. The electric guitar was recorded from a microphone placed in front of the amplifier. Penetrating and, at times, almost irritating. Not for how they sound, but for the music itself. If I had to make a comparison, the interaction between the two instruments is more like a street discussion than a conversation. I don't know how the sound engineers did it, but the final result is not tiring anyway. Of course, provided that this is the music you are looking for. The recording volume is low, it has virtually no depth or texture, but it is still interesting, engaging and mesmerizing. I would define this album as: a mesmerizing and subliminal message. After the initial shock, the musicians give 100% from the very beginning, we start to accept it and then we get involved in the musical message. The sound is obviously not the best possible, but after a moment we stop paying attention to how it all sounds, or even to the music being played, as we are in a parallel universe, out of time and planet Earth. Recorded on June 28, 1970 and released in September of the same year, this album has always been seen as an important meeting between two of the most important exponents of Japanese free music. It is perhaps the most heavily fetishized album to ever emerge from the Japanese underground. As I said before, it is a cult album. Abe played his first duo with Takayanagi on May 7 of that year, a concert that was billed as “Masayuki Takayanagi New Direction” (the concert flyer was apparently titled in English “New direction for all who are interested in jazz” and subtitled, in Japanese, “Projection towards the annihilation of jazz”); the June 28 concert that was released as Kaitaiteki kokan was, confusingly, billed as New Direction. Aficionados are probably still debating whether the record is more correctly labeled as a Takayanagi/New Direction(s) album or a Takayanagi/Abe duo. Regardless, DIW opted for the latter form. The two continued to play together for a few more concerts under the name Takayanagi New Direction, adding Yamazaki to the group; their last concert was in early October, after which the Takayanagi/Abe association seems to have ended. The music resembles a pitched battle, with the two seemingly playing against each other: Takayanagi, on electric guitar, plays in a recognizably "jazz" style, amplifying and distorting motifs, methodically separating them with a thin, harshly brittle feedback tone that is often jarring to listen to; Abe wails regardless, full of bravado and seemingly paying little attention to his partner, behavior not entirely uncharacteristic of him at this point in his career. The two mostly sound as if they are playing at the same time but not together, and moments of interaction are few and far between. This record represents an extreme case of the inclination toward autonomy in improvised music, well beyond Cageian anarchic liberalism.

The two musicians seem to prefer clashing and arguing, attacking each other before the commonality can solidify into a convention. An album that still sounds extraordinary: the expression of something primal, almost prehuman, in which the stable musical space is replaced by a sound world torn from the release of psychic energy, on the verge of disintegrating into chaos. An attitude not so different from that of their own lives. Like Abe, Takayanagi has left an indelible mark on the world of musical counterculture. At his best, alone or with his New Direction Unit (also known variously as New Directions and New Direction For The Arts), he operated at a level of inspiration that was perhaps superior to that of Sonny Sharrock, one of the few relatively comparable figures, and Takayanagi's recordings from that decade are just examples of what's possible when the technique and skill of improvisation, the energy and dissonance of free jazz, and the volume and aggression of rock music meet inside a gravitational black hole. His influence can be clearly detected in modern heavyweights such as Rudolph Gray ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolph_Grey ) and Stefan Jaworzyn ( https://www.thewire.co.uk/audio/tracks/listen_stefan-jaworzyn-music ). Unfortunately, Takayanagi also possessed an uncompromising character, quickly managing to completely out-of-joint with the jazz establishment in a fairly short period of time, living a forcedly marginal musical existence.

This album is not the only result of their collaboration. After “Kaitai Teki Kohkan” DIW produced “Mass Projection”

and “Gradually Projection”

which always maintain the same high standard and are also collector's items that I am trying to buy. The two are out of any rule, whether it is that of keeping jazz in standards or of wedging rock into refrains suitable for sale, mixing everything to the extreme, giving improvisation a new form, more brilliant and bastard. Disowned by the puritans, they did nothing to counteract this trend. They went ahead alone. Unconcerned. Recently Jinya Records has produced three more CDs:

“Live at Station '70”, the result of the recordings of the concerts held on June 18 and in May or June 1970, in Tokyo.

The second CD is entitled “Jazzbed”, a live recording at Jazzbed on September 27, 1970, again in Tokyo, with the presence of drummer Hiroshi Yamazaki. All with the same level of energy, creativity and brilliant madness.

"Masayuki Takayanagi & Kaoru Abe* = 高柳昌行* & 阿部薫* – Real Jazz = リアルジャズ" was produced on May 29, 2024 and is another discographic miracle for Takayanagi sufferers. This is another “The Disintegration of the Sympathetic”, a 1970 live studio recording by Masayuki Takayanagi and Kaoru Abe.

This is the miraculous discovery of forty minutes of live studio recordings by Masayuki Takayanagi and Kaoru Abe from July 1970 and therefore shortly after the original matrix of “Kaitai Teki Kōkan”, where we find a flow of continuous immediate improvisation, without any thematic motif noted. The tapes from which this material was recovered were in poor condition due to problems with the recording equipment and deterioration due to age, and have been restored. Although there are some parts that are difficult to listen to, I consider this CD fundamental in the study of Takayanagi as it is an important historical document.

I wonder if there could be any musicians like this today, but I don't think so. I think that Abe and Takayanagi were two “products” of a specific historical moment and a particular subculture. Forced to operate in a cultural periphery, they have fought all their lives to be able to express their music, accepting an outsider role that has slowly elevated them to the level of "cult" I spoke about at the beginning of this post. Their music has been passed down thanks to a circle, a group of loyal fans that has slowly grown, finding admirers even outside of Japan. Today they are experiencing a second youth thanks to a targeted series of excellent reissues. Welcome to the cult.

I think this is a sign of the times and the art forms we live in. It is becoming more and more common for a classically trained musician not only to prove himself a worthy performer in the world of contemporary and experimental music, but also to venture into improvisation and immediate composition. Take, for example, the Italian guitarist and musicologist Giacomo Fiore.

Fiore has premiered more than two dozen new works for tuned, electric, and classical guitars, and has released several recordings for Populist, Cold Blue, Pinna, Spectropol, Paper Garden Records, and his own label. As a scholar, his research focuses on American experimental music, intonation, and performance; he has published articles in Music Theory Spectrum, the Journal of the Society for the American Music, and TEMPO, and writes occasionally for Classical Guitar and SFCV. He teaches a wide range of courses in historical and practical music at the University of San Francisco and UC Santa Cruz. Giacomo is a member of Ninth Planet New Music (the chamber group formerly known as Wild Rumpus) and an occasional performer for New Music Works, sfSound, and other Bay Area organizations. He has served as curator of the Center for New Music since 2019 and as vice president of the Northern California Chapter of the American Musicological Society from 2015 to 2019.

“Lost Horse Wash Drone,” is his latest work, released on Other Minds. The CD features Fiore playing a variety of finely tuned guitars, along with field recordings from Joshua Tree National Park.

The concept for this album was born out of Giacomo Fiore’s week-long residency at the Lou Harrison House in Joshua Tree, California in March 2023. Surrounded by the desert surroundings, Fiore immersed himself in exploring Lou Harrison’s musical legacy, drawing inspiration from Harrison’s creative practice and his commitment to environmental conservation.

Armed with a fretless electric guitar, a resonator guitar (a copy of the instrument Harrison designed for his final composition, “Scenes from Nek Chand”), and his recording equipment, Fiore ventured into the heart of Joshua Tree National Park to capture the aural essence of the desert landscape. Despite the challenges posed by man-made noise pollution, Fiore persevered, employing inventive techniques such as inserting microphones into his guitar to blend the sounds of the environment with the acoustics of his instrument.

The result is something transversal, a kind of lateral music that combines the emotions immediately generated by listening, with a whole series of reflections that emerge later, slowly. It must be said that, sometimes, it is difficult to know which of the sounds we listen to comes from the field recording and which from Fiore's guitars. The author's ability to manipulate and integrate the different sounds into a complete and organic narrative quickly makes us forget these acousmatic and technical aspects to allow the listener to grasp a whole series of connections with Harrison's music and the cultural context in which it developed. In fact, you can feel that the music "Lost Horse Wash Drone" is inhabited by the gentle ghost of Lou Harrison, his gentle presence runs through all five tracks of the album that, temporally, seems to span an entire day, from "Morning" to Night".

"Lost Horse Wash Drone" is a very intimate and sensitive work, which reflects the profound influence of Harrison's music and ethics on Giacomo Fiore himself. I can't think of a better way to honor and, at the same time, go beyond the ideas of this great American composer, integrating them into a more contemporary vision. Listen to it calmly, several times, in the evening, perhaps after a storm. You will see sound flowers bloom in the desert.

Sandy Bull? And who was he? Sandy Bull is a legendary name, if you think you belong to a cult because you love Segovia or Basho or Fahey ... well you're wrong, for Bull fans you are even mainstream. A brilliant and innovative guitarist in the 60s, a pure alchemical son of that flower power generation that wanted to change the world, Sandy was a true outsider in the world of contemporary guitar. A brilliant multi-instrumentalist, he was able to switch with ease from the acoustic guitar to the electric guitar to the oud and banjo. Born in 1941 in New York, he passed away from cancer in 2001 ... without ever having seen his ante-literam innovator and experimenter skills truly recognized.

His music is a prodigious synthesis of antithetical idioms and one of the most enduring achievements of avant-garde folk. Bull had nothing to do with the nascent country-rock movement, but his lesson in creative individualism was fundamental in opening new horizons to the genre that will be called "American primitivism".

His albums present a mixture of traditional music and American blues mixed with melodies and ideas drawn from oriental and Persian music. He left us a handful of records, not easily available and territory for collectors and die-hard fans (including myself). For those who want to compare with his ideas, I strongly recommend buying and carefully listening to this handful of truly interesting and unique albums.

Bull made his first album in 1963, “Fantasias For Guitar & Banjo” (Vanguard, 1963), with the sole accompaniment of Ornette Coleman’s drummer Billy Higgins. The album’s highlight is the twenty-two-minute suite, Blend, for banjo-tuned guitar and drums. Influenced by oud player Hamza El Din, with whom he shared an apartment in Hollywood in 1963, Blend is a rhythmic synthesis of jazz improvisations, raga syncopations, Arabic chords and folk melodies, a driving sonic excursus that explores fabulous worlds filtered through the sensibility of a folk ballad singer, alternating slow, transcendent phases with furious jams. Often psychedelic, before anyone even knew what psychedelia was. Remember, it was 1963, the Beatles were singing “Please Please Me” and Bob Dylan was just starting to make a name for himself. Among the other tracks on the album, some arrangements of classical music for solo banjo or guitar stand out.

On the next “Inventions For Guitar And Banjo” (Vanguard, 1965), recorded in 1964, another masterpiece, we find the sequel: Blend II. It is a melange (a little more electric in tone) of folk, jazz and Middle Eastern, this time lasting 24 minutes. Also included on this 54-minute LP are two versions (electric and acoustic) of a piece by Bach, a 14th century composition (Guillaume de Machaut's "Triple Ballade") and Luiz Bonfa's "Manha de Carnival". An extended and heavily reverbed version (with drums) of Chuck Berry's "Memphis, Tennessee" closes the set with an unexpected explosion of rock & roll.

“E Pluribus Unum” (Vanguard, 1970 - Sutro Park, 2009), recorded mostly in 1968, is his psychedelic album. Played on a guitar with a metallic, dry, bristly sound, the electric signal is divided by four different amplifiers. The album contains two long meditations: Electric Blend (a "blend" for electric guitar whose signal is amplified in four different ways), a suite projected by spatial chords that continually rise and fall, an intense and suffused prayer marked by the rhythm of a procession by Indian drums, with the guitar imitating the nasal notes of the sitar; and No Deposit No Return Blues, a vibrant jam for guitar, bass, drums, oud, hi-hat cymbal, cowbell, which unfolds in a slow rhythmic crescendo of touches, vibrations, counterpoints, echoes, percussive noises.

Bull used to accompany himself live using music already pre-recorded on tape or using a rudimentary, but effective, system of overdubbing, as demonstrated in another excellent album released in 2006 by Water Records: Still Valentine's Day, 1969: Live At the Matrix, San Francisco. It's another fabulous album. It was recently re-released with a new graphic design and a new remastering on bancamp. Don't miss it.

The news is one of those that leaves you breathless. On August 10, 2024, the guitarist / experimenter / composer from New Zealand Dean Roberts passed away suddenly in his sleep. He was 49 years old. The news was given by Jon Abbey of Erstwhile Records, citing the musician's sister.

What a fate, to die like this, when he still had so much to say and to make us listen to. I have no further information and, perhaps, it is right that way. Roberts has never been one who loved the limelight, like many other musicians involved in experimental music; he probably would have appreciated the affectionate declarations of esteem that are bouncing around the net from enthusiasts and colleagues, but he would not have given too much information. I don't know, I never had the pleasure of knowing him, mine is a feeling that comes from listening to his music, with which I am still trying to come to terms.

Just recently I had purchased, at a very cheap price, his first solo work "Moth Park / Soundracks to Utopia" published by Formacentric Disk, his personal label, created in 1995, to promote his music.

An album that confirmed my personal doubts about his music: ambient? Sound Art? Slow fi? Warm isolationism? Deconstructed architecture? I have never been able to give myself precise answers.

But who was Dean Roberts? Dean Roberts was a guitarist, experimental composer and multi-instrumentalist who began his career in the New Zealand noise trio Thela, before embarking on a series of solo projects and albums with Autistic Daughters.

His first solo album, Moth Park (Formacentric, 1998), presented a very particular music, a balanced mix between spirituality and ambient, psychedelia and ethnic (thinking of “My life in a Bush of Ghost” by Eno/Byrne). But his masterpiece, I think, was that “All Cracked Medias” (Mille Plateaux, 1999), which left me decidedly disconcerted.

A student of Scratch Orchestra member Philip Dadson, Roberts approached composed sound sculpture through the meta-musical relationship of the exploratory improvisational orchestra. Roberts took a performance-based approach to the presentation of sound, relying on unconventional “prepared” and “tabletop” guitar treatments and a fluid phraseology of texture and timbre. The three lengthy pieces that comprise “All Cracked Medias,” employed guitars, piano, and various percussive devices, citing examples from the British improvisational ensemble AMM.

It blew me away. At the time I was still trying to understand Brian Eno's ambient and Tortoise's post-rock. I didn't understand anything about this album, I decided, wisely, to file it away and grow. I had decided to try again with "Moth Park/Soundracks to Utopia", to then climb his discography.

"Moth Park/Soundracks to Utopia" was made in 1997 in Auckland, New Zealand, with Dean Roberts playing lead electric guitar live into a two-track recorder; the four long compositions on the record consist of melancholic, subdued soundscapes that carefully avoid organized tones or even any kind of ambient wash. You can hear the quotes and references from Fred Frith's guitar solos, Keith Rowe's prepared guitar experiments and the work of Remko Scha, Allan Bryant, Glen Branca... and other pleasant obsessions.

Incorporating drone, sound sculpture, the work of AMM, and developing a body of work primarily focused on the electric guitar, employed with extensive preparations and techniques, “Moth Park/Soundracks to Utopia” defines both a concise and definitive exploration of the style of a certain type of harmonically fluorescent prepared electric guitar, and a form of 4 soundtrack tracks, in a dense and colorful work that speaks of complexity, control and shows a unique modernist approach to an instrument killed and brought back to life outside of popular music. This album shares an ethic and an alignment with the developmental work of instrument deconstructivists such as Frith/Reichel/Remko Scha, although this rigorous approach is balanced by an underlying narrative thread.

These are the few words that tell us how Dean Roberts was one of the most anomalous and particular guitarists in the research area, while not disdaining less experimental and more intelligible incursions, has suddenly passed away leaving a void that is difficult to fill. His music has touched folk, ambient, drone music, neo-minimalism and much more creating a personal and recognizable blend, as well as for the humanity and availability of his person, which many are recognizing on social media since the news spread. Farewell, Dean Roberts.

It's done now. Fennesz has also begun his personal work of anthological archiving and canonization of his own musical production. From August 23, 2024, in fact, you can buy the updated, extended and remastered reissue of one of his masterpieces from 2004: the album "Venice", the happy successor to the amazing "Endless Summer" that had unequivocally established the talent of this brilliant Austrian guitarist.

To tell the truth, the first notices of this remastering work, official title "Venice 20", had already been noticed in May 2024 with the announcement of the new single, digital-only format, entitled "Sognato di Domani".

On Fennesz's bandcamp page and website it was announced: “'Sognato di Domani' is a new recording made by Christian Fennesz, completed in the context of his upcoming album due for release later this year. In parallel with making new work, we are planning to present a 20th anniversary release of 'Venice', which will be ready very soon in its remastered splendour. 'Sognato di Domani' fitted the complexion of this earlier 2004 classic quite exactly, and in many ways revitalises it. The track you will hear on the 'Venice 20' CD is an edited version of the digital release we present now: the full version. The photography is an out-take from the footage captured for 'Liquid Music', made in 2001 and planned for the technically impossible DVD release in 2005.”

On August 9, again on his website, Fennesz announced: The 20th anniversary re-issue of Fennesz's best-selling 'Venice', originally released in 2004, “is now available as a deluxe version remastered by Denis Blackham, with new and extra tracks not on the previous CD or vinyl versions. Included in the DVD-format edition is a booklet with texts by Fennesz himself, Denis Blackham & Jon Wozencroft, with unseen photographs from the original 2004 sessions. The booklet also reproduces David Sylvian's original handwritten lyrics for 'Transit'. This "stunning collaboration with David Sylvian continues where their fantastic duo track on Sylvian's album Blemish left off. Situated directly in the middle of a mostly subdued listening experience, 'Transit' literally bursts out of the speakers accentuating the album's more pop-like characteristics as well as its more restrained moments." “

Why is this reissue so important, even though I personally decided not to buy it, as I have owned the first version for almost 20 years? For two excellent reasons, first because it is a beautiful album that, after all this time, has never lost its shine and freshness; second because Fennesz is one of the musicians who has best been able to renew and create new research paths for the electric guitar.

I have noticed that in my library there are at least ten CDs by Fennesz, some of which are autographed. I admit, I am a hedonistic listener, but I have never allowed my sense of duty to interfere with such a personal passion as buying CDs and LPs, nor have I ever bought so many records, crudely, in piles. That persevering ten highlights, therefore, the continuous “listenability” of Fennesz’s music, a condition that in English is called, I think, “readableness”.

My encounter with Fennesz's elaborate guitar happened in 1998, in the studios of Radio Base Popolare in Mestre where I was helping, having fun, some friends in the preparation of their radio program White Noise, dedicated to frontier music. One evening a friend, I don't remember who, brought this CD, slipped into a white, red and black cardboard case, where the drawing of a prohibition on a palm tree was clearly visible and listening to which really left us speechless. It was that "PLAY", a mini CD produced by Mego that contained two covers: "Paint it Black" by the Rolling Stones and "Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)" which anticipated, but we at the time could not have known, that "Endless Summer" that would have made us shout miracle a few years later. We were in the midst of the "glitch" era and discovering a guitarist who was able to evolve his glacial aesthetics thanks to sounds generated from the guitar and not through synthetic processes, was a nice surprise.

A surprise that became a consolidated confirmation in 2004 when “Venice” appeared, and there too it was love at first listen. “Venice” showed a baroque kaleidoscope of sounds and compelling guitar harmonics, where the enthusiasm for glitch aesthetics, for sound fragmentation, for digital noises and, above all, for the guitar were revived. This album shows a surface made of unstable, iridescent sounds, now compact and dense, now rarefied and disturbed by hisses, random electronic impulses. If you want to try the experience of a true immersion in sound this album is for you: intricate soundscapes, drones, a hypnagogic rain; the result is a balanced mix of abstraction, emotion and pure suggestion. The musical context, previously easily untranslatable and artificial, reveals its real substratum only when a sound becomes traceable to the human experience of "common feeling" and the listener can recognize its natural origin, celebrating the conceptual aspiration of this ambitious work: the exploration of the relationship between analog and digital through the masking, dissimulation and transformation of what is audible in reality. Fennesz, the Austrian wizard of guitar-processing, maintains, as always, a very personal taste for certain melodies almost hidden in the complex texture of his digital drifts. Buy the new edition? What do you think? Should I buy it?

setola di maiale | SM4720

The Encyclopedia Britannica brings us back to this definition of metaphor: “metaphor, figure of speech that implies comparison between two unlike entities, as distinguished from simile, an explicit comparison signalled by the words like or as.” Subito dopo aggiunge, per maggiore precisione come. “The distinction is not simple. A metaphor makes a qualitative leap from a reasonable, perhaps prosaic, comparison to an identification or fusion of two objects, the intention being to create one new entity that partakes of the characteristics of both. Many critics regard the making of metaphors as a system of thought antedating or bypassing logic.”

This philosophical concept, which still reigns in our culture and society, came to my mind from the first time I listened to this CD “Klang! Catastrofe del Vuoto Elettrodebole”, produced by two Italian musicians, Andrea Masseria (guitar, effects) and Alessandro Seravalle (live electronics, samples), in 2024 for the renowned Italian independent record label Setola di Maiale.

Let's introduce these two musicians a little better.

Andrea Massaria is an Italian guitar player and composer based in Trieste, Italia. He works in the field of improvised music, drawing from a wide range of influences. He spans from free jazz to textural soundwork to noise to contemporary classical music. He teaches at the Conservatorio of Venezia and Adria.

Alessandro Seravalle has been active on the music scene for over twenty-five years as a composer and very prolific performer in various contexts, especially in the field of progressive rock where he has established himself as a manipulator of electronic sounds, guitarist and singer. The fight against every form of artistic cliché is the key to his expressive research. For years he has been developing countless new forms of musical language, from ambient, to spoken word improvisation, to choreographic-visual-musical experiments with various aliases including Genoma, Schwingungen 77 Entertainment, James Frederick Willett, Agrapha Dogmata, Bonsoir Trio, SeTe. With his brother Gianpietro, he also forms a duo (Officina F.lli Seravalle) dedicated to a form of experimental neo-psychedelia.

Now, defining this CD as a work of avant-garde music would be reductive and, certainly, would propose a dated vision, with a military-style language that, I hope, is now an exclusive part of the cultural heritage of the last century and millennium. “Klang! Catastrofe del Vuoto Elettrodebole” is definitely an album of unconventional and research music, a form of sound exploration, on the border between philosophical settings and sound art. Perhaps I would better write that this album is a mix of metaphors and references to something else, to intuitions and mental games, left to the free interpretation of the listener. Irony and witty fun seem to be its keys to interpretation, starting from the title with this reference to the German sound and the laws of physics, to the CD graphics, which winks at the logo of the record company Deutsche Grammofon, to the pseudonyms 'Anton Klang' for Massaria and 'Karlheinz Lärm' for Seravalle, which, in turn, refer to two historical figures of experimental music of the twentieth century. Too many things, perhaps? I don't think so.

Let's go back to the Encyclopedia Britannica which, in fact, adds: “Metaphor is the fundamental language of poetry, although it is common on all levels and in all kinds of language...In poetry a metaphor may perform varied functions from the mere noting of a likeness to the evocation of a swarm of associations; it may exist as a minor beauty or it may be the central concept and controlling image of the poem.”

And I think this is the fundamental point. This album manages to unite poetry, philosophy, physics and sophisticated languages ​​through a desire for research and abstraction that also reconcile a sound art listening, of pure immersion and contemplation of sound. The boundaries here are confused, blurred, the directions many and complex. “Klang! Catastrofe del Vuoto Elettrodebole” is a fascinating work, which shows how the guitar still has a lot to say.

The Healer | SUMAC (bandcamp.com)

In 1995, in the magazine “Village Voice”, the music critic Simon Reynolds published an essay entitled “Post-Rock” where the foundations of this new musical genre were defined: “Post-rock means bands that use guitars but in nonrock ways, as timbre and texture rather than riff and powerchord. It also means bands that augment rock's basic-bass -drums lineup with digital technology such as samplers and sequencers, or tamper with the trad rock lineup but prefer antiquated analog synths and nonrock instrumentation. With its droneswarm guitars and tendency to melt into ambience, post-rock first erodes, then obliterates the song and the voice.”

Audio Culture Readings in Modern Music, pag. 358

These words come back to me almost thirty years later, listening to "The Healer", the fifth album, the latest effort by SUMAC, a powerful metal trio formed by Aaron Turner (Isis, Old Man Gloom, Mamiffer), Nick Yacyshyn ( Baptists) and Brian Cook (Russian Circles, These Arms Are Snakes). It's their first album that I buy and listen to and I was pleasantly surprised by it.

SUMAC seems like a post-rock version of classic metal bands, where their sprawling style, carefully calculated and semi-improvised at the same time, strongly recalls the ideas of Simon Reynolds, showing an interesting evolutionary line in metal themes.

Regardless of the song form, with an album 76 minutes long and with only four tracks (World of Light, Yellow Dawn, New Rites and The Stone's Turn), which take the form of real suites in length and structure, SUMAC alternates with an efficient balancing of long waves of powerful drones with recursive exercises of chaos and control, managed with a careful and constant process of expansion, contraction, corruption and regrowth.

“The Healer” requires careful and difficult listening, in which you need to let yourself go to the slow heaviness of the guitar feedbacks, accompanied by the cavernous depths reached by Aaron Turner's voice. “The Healer” is a “post” album in which the band not only invests all its experience, but also the vast range of metal subgenres, adding stylistic references to an already complex work. There is something exciting in a work that should, in theory, be rather boring and monotonous, but which in reality proves to be the exact opposite, proving to be an enjoyable sensorial and cerebral experience, thanks to the obsessive care that SUMAC dedicates to every detail and the continuous creation of intertwined dynamics, dynamics often hidden in the plots of a pure alienating impact.

It's no coincidence, in the end, that these metal veterans were produced by Thrill Jockey. Surrender to the metal.

Italians do It Better. Again. And again. This time it was the Italian guitarist Antonio Tonietti who caught my attention, with his album “No Longer Human”, published on Dissipatio Records.

No Longer Human | Antonio Tonietti | DISSIPATIO (bandcamp.com)

The subject of Tonietti's musical construction is the novel “No longer human”, the work of the Japanese writer Osamu Dazai, translated into Italian with the title “Lo Squalificato”. I have never read anything of Dazai's works, but while looking for some reviews of the book on the web, I read about a novel that talks about the protagonist's feeling of being rejected by society. A book that talks about alienation therefore, a sensation that is clearly felt in the four sound paintings, the four tracks of Tonietti's album: “First notebook”, “Second notebook”, “Third notebook” and “Epilogue”.

Tonietti belongs to that small group of guitarists who love to transform the sound of their instrument, to the point of completely forgetting not only its sonic origins, but above all its musical and cultural references. Furthermore, his attention to the sense of space contributes to the creation of a musical vision that leads to an augmented ambient, a sort of Brian Eno on steroids. The saturation of sound and the space it fills seems to be one of his stylistic traits, together with the dark and post-industrial vision that it accompanies.

I think another distinctive aspect is the use of voices within the music: having removed any melodic or song-like ambitions, the declaiming voices of Claudio Milano, Giorgio Pinardi, and Silvia Pegah Scaglione increase the sense of alienation and insert a haunting element in the music, whose further sense of detachment from the real world is given by the insertions of Massimo Amato's piano, Tetsuroh Konishi's modified alto flute and the prepared battente guitar played by Tonietti himself.

Borges teaches us in “Textos recobrados (1919-1929)” how there are two types of aesthetics: the passive aesthetics of mirrors and the active aesthetics of prisms. If guided by the mirror, art, at best, transforms itself into a copy of the objectivity of the environment or the psychic history of the individual. If instead guided by the prism, art makes the world its instrument and forges its own personal vision. It seems to me that Antonio Tonietti, and with him Dissipatio Records, has taken advantage of this teaching.

More about Dissipatio …

Although Neuguitars is an English-language blog, its origins are Italian. I therefore don't think it comes as a surprise to the reader to read, on its virtual pages, about numerous Italian artists, all guitarists brilliantly committed to pursuing their own musical paths, in experimentation, research and avant-garde. Giuseppe Ielasi is certainly one of these persons.

Musician and composer, Giuseppe Ielasi worked from 1996 to 2006 in the field of improvised music, collaborating with musicians such as Jerome Noetinger, Martin Siewert, Brandon Labelle, Nmperign, Phill Niblock, Oren Ambarchi, Mark Wastell, Nikos Veliotis. Since 2007 he has mainly been involved in composing electroacoustic music, often performed and reworked in concert, during various tours in Europe, the United States and Japan and participation in numerous international festivals. In 2010 he presented his works at the Center Pompidou in Paris and at INA-Grm (Radio France). He has collaborated since 2005 with Armin Linke, as a musician in audiovisual performances (ZKM Karlsruhe, RomaEuropa Festival, Goethe Institut New York, Villa Romana Florence), and as an editor and composer for video and cinematographic productions (the medium-length film Alpi was presented at the Film Festival of Berlin 2011). From 1998 to 2005 he managed the record label Fringes Recordings, creating productions by Eliane Radigue, Alvin Curran, Rolf Julius, Charlemagne Palestine, Brandon Labelle, Eric La Casa and many others. He is currently co-curator of two labels: Schoolmap Records (with Francesco Tenaglia, with whom he has produced works by David Toop, Eliane Radigue, Akira Rabelais, Tom Recchion and others) and Senufo Editions (with Jennifer Veillerobe). Added to these activities is a long experience in the field of audio post-production (mixing, mastering) for cinema, video and record labels such as Alga Marghen, Die-Schachtel, 12k, Preservation and many others. Ileasi started playing the guitar in 1988, and worked in the 'improvised music' sector for many years. Since 2007 he has concentrated mainly on studio work, working on compositions for CDs and records, theater and cinema. He subsequently abandoned the guitar and his performances are now based on multi-channel diffusion and recomposition of pre-existing pieces and fragments, to create complex site-specific sound works.

For a few years, however, he has returned to the guitar, first in 2020 with the album "Five Wooden Frames", then in 2022 with "The Prospect", all released on the independent New York label 12K. Two seminal works, in which the attention seems to be placed between the fractures generated between time and space. A first listen to Ielasi's music immediately warns us that we are faced with a musician who has something to say, with a personality that immediately appears so decisive and evident that our discussion cannot undergo diversions, whether in a laudatory tone or superfluous search for sources to rely on.

Ielasi's music is a lively and opaque game of minimal sound spots, a progression of solitary and repetitive signs, a distracted harmony, a dense conciseness of gestures. Strongly thought out, studied and organized music in which the genre scene or elegy becomes mime and drama, in the plasticity desired by the expression, in which white and light become volume.

A mature and self-confident musical handwriting, capable of expressing a moving poetics that fits perfectly with the images shown on the covers of the two CDs: photographs of empty, perhaps abandoned, tennis courts. These two albums go straight to the point, nothing marginal, unnecessary, baroque has been left, they are the result of an elaborate intrigue of very concise musical lines that seem to define and sculpt the space, carving themselves into a new, complex, complete and imaginative crowd of shapes. A moral world emerges, where sound, form and space become a volume alien to any conceptual coldness and aridity. A mature musical sign.

His latest work was released in 2024, again for electric guitar only, entitled “Effacing colours, barely dancing” with the Italian label 901 Editions. This is the most melodic and apparently least experimental album of the three, and follows the path shown by “The Prospect”. This album led me towards different considerations from those of the first two. Recently I've been noticing how, perhaps as a reaction to post-covid, perhaps due to a broader artistic reflection on our society, musical times are slowing down. I am obviously referring to the research music you read here on Neuguitars, I am certainly not talking about mainstream music, which instead continues to function as a supplement for the dangerous acceleration in times and consumption undertaken by our society.

We need breaks, more time away from electronic connections and, above all, from the constant low-energy, low-quality attention-seeking attempts we are subjected to. Ielasi's music seems to go in the direction of listening that requires moments of quiet, concentration and reflection and a detachment from digital reality, from the continuous high-speed scrolling of images, videos and distractions with low consumption and high emotional and mental drainage. Buying and listening to Ielasi's CDs, like other guitarists on the blog, goes both in the direction of enhancing our listening and giving importance to our purchases, helping ourselves to recover our balance.

Majestic. Unsettling. Dark. Maximalist. Isolationist. Five adjectives to try to find a definition for the music contained in the new, recent CD “What we don't see”, produced by Avalanche Recordings and Final ( Final (band) - Wikipedia ), Justin K Broadrick's alter ego, which existed sporadically since the end of 1983, when he was 13 years old, initially as an exploration into the fields of industrial and electronic music, shelved in 1986 while Broadrick continued his activities with Napalm Death, Head Of David and Godflesh, and then revitalized in 1992, to study themes dark environments and spaces without rhythm, almost exclusively built around a deviant idea of ​​guitar.

This “What we don't see”, so full of themes close to Mark Fisher's ideas on the eerie world, could not fail to catch my attention, requiring careful and in-depth listening.

“The theme of this recording is the invisible world, and one's (my) need for it. It's necessary for me, this idea of the invisible world, if I am to function on a daily basis. I find comfort in knowing that this is all not just us here and now, that there's something else around us. That there's something within us, that isn't just this frail skin and bones and the immediate environments we drag ourselves around. I am sure since I was a child, that within me I am many, I am more than this. I surely can't be just this, so I am motivated by the fantasy and/or promise of more...”

so Broadrick writes on the Bancamp page of this album.

The object of Broadrick's attention therefore seems to be the forces that operate behind the common ways of interpreting reality, perhaps represented by extrasensory perception and fate. A music that has to do with the attraction for the outside, for what lies beyond perception, knowledge and common experience and in which the eerie is the work of the unconscious itself. For Broadrick the invisible seems to be a clear example of "nothing where there should be something", of a void that conceals itself, and which shows us how 'not seeing what is there' is at the same time a stranger and more more ordinary than seeing what isn't there. The inability to see, the involuntary process by which we leave out an element that contradicts, or simply does not fit, with the predominant stories we tell ourselves, is part of the continuous "editing process" through which we recreate what we we experience as an identity. In negative hallucination, objects and entities are typically perceived, but not seen by the individual. More easily, or rather inevitably, they are heard. And if sound fills a space that we see as empty, offering new possibilities and new sensations, then Broadrick's music asks us metaphysical questions that concern existence and non-existence: why is there something here when there shouldn't be Nothing? Why is there nothing when there should be something?

“What I’m interested in with guitar is either having a lot of emotion or a melancholic aspect – which is Jesu – or with things like Godflesh, JK Flesh and Greymachine it’s abstraction. It’s informed by the first time I heard Killing Joke in 1980, and the way they used guitar, and the first Public Image. I was really influenced the way guitars were so much more abused and non-conventional with those guys. Non-rock! Dissonance! It does something to me physically that I find fascinating. I become so immersed that I can’t see outside of it. And then it gets close to meditation or astral projection. “

Extreme Language: An Interview With Justin K. Broadrick | The Quietus

This music is a possible signal of the fact that the concepts and reference systems to which we are accustomed are now obsolete. Broadrick's augmented guitars express an 'eerie calm', offering us access to forces that govern ordinary reality, but which are normally hidden, as well as spaces that are entirely beyond ordinary reality. It is this liberation from the ordinary, this escape from the confines of what we call musical reality that explains the charm of the music contained in this album. The absence of rhythm, the dark and dilated atmospheres, the background hiss that gives a sense of proportion, the slowed down time are all elements of a form of musical hypernaturalism: an expanded perception of what is found in the material universe. I invite you to a high volume dive.

“Catz listened, feeling as if she were melting inside. Sweat beaded on her forehead. In the background, behind the disembodied voice, her band wailed and throbbed and roared angst rock, metal stripped down, fast and angry music like the echo of a subway thundering into the station.”

John Shirley, CITY COME A-WALKIN', 1980

Sonic Youth aren't back but, perhaps, they never went away. If Sonic Youth have no longer existed as an active/operational group since 2011, they have however started an intense activity of archiving, reprinting and anthologizing their work, which has in turn activated an intense process of canonisation/sanctification by critics, historians and the public itself. On March 11, 2022, the blog/magazine The Quietus published this article by JR Moores: Reissue Of The Week: Sonic Youth's In/Out/In where the author, I believe rightly, wrote:

“Despite, or perhaps owing to, the fact that a reunion tour isn't likely to happen anytime soon, Sonic Youth have had the best separation that fans could have hoped for. Much of the time, it hardly feels as if they've even gone away. We are basically living in the state of limbo that we used to inhabit between the "official" studio albums that would pop up every one-to-three years from 1982 to 2009. When waiting for those "proper" records to appear, fans' thirst for all things Sonic Youth would be quenched by various side-projects, live albums, archive releases, reissues, solo works, poetry books, art exhibitions and collaborative performances where Kim, Thurston, Lee or Steve would make an atonal racket while somebody who was still a card-carrying member of the radical underground blew a saxophone like billy-o or sawed a skateboard attached to a contact mic in half. The limbo is now permanent. It still ain't such a bad place to be.“

The subject of Moores' critical investigation was the new album of unreleased songs "In/Out/In", which for a short period had almost raised hopes of a reunion of the group. The album itself, the result of the assembly of 5 songs, some of which were already present in other compilations, cassettes, limited editions, which spanned a period of about eight years, from 2000 to 2010, what did it really offer that was new?

In/Out/In” was an album of entirely instrumental music, the first if we don't consider the eccentric and smart “Goodbye 20th Century”, where SY interpreted, in their own way, pieces of contemporary music composed by John Cage, Steve Reich, Christian Wolff, Cornelius Cardew, Yoko Hono, Pauline Oliveiros and others. In “In/Out/In”, however, SY were simply themselves: that is, they sounded like Pink Floyd under estrogen, with long improvisational rides that recalled the Grateful Dead and which attested to the excellent level of internal cooperation and of musical telepathy achieved by band members. “In/Out/In”, basically, was an electric contemporary chamber music record that didn't sound like a farewell, but more like the continuation of an epic past, in the wake of the alternative music boom of the 80s/90s, which SY had been largely responsible for.

What Moores' article highlighted was the limbic nature of their current artistic non-existence. Unlike other historical bands, where the work of sanctification and canonization began some time after their dissolution, perhaps on the occasion of a revival or on the occasion of the death of one of their members, SY never seems to have marked a boundary between their dissolution and the consequent, almost immediate, start of the anthological archiving and recovery activity. If you go visit their two sites on Bandcamp( Music | Sonic Youth (bandcamp.com) e Music | Sonic Youth Archive (bandcamp.com) ) you will be literally submerged by a flow of recordings made available in digital mode, a true sonic bulimia capable of satisfying the appetite of every fetishistic fan of the band.

I recently decided to let myself be tempted by the reprint of three of their live performances: "Walls Have Ears", "Live In Berlin 2009" and "Live in Brooklyn 2011", all purchased in CD format. The reason? You haven't seen SY live and live recordings seemed like the perfect way to compensate, I clearly prefer the CD format to the LP and, moreover, I also implicitly wanted to enter their anthological flow.

The truth is that, perhaps, I too have entered a hauntological, nostalgic and middle-aged phase. I love these three of their live albums, so simple and consistent in their format and price with the ethics that the band has always expressed without ever saving themselves or selling themselves short. Three live shows with a high energy impact, which reinterpret their song form each time and where maximum space is given to improvisation and interplay.

Three live shows where speed, desire, sweat, machine oil, electricity come together in a form that still exudes that cool energy that SY have always accustomed us to, regardless of the different periods in which they were recorded. It's true, SY never left, they are still with us, albeit in a dispersed and distanced form, engaged in a myriad of personal projects with a high cultural, informative and communicative density. Their cultural legacies are immense, like their sound, which immediately identifies them as a group and not as soloists.

Unlike most legendary rock bands, once the group experience ended, they didn't stop. They continued to draw personal communicative parables, remaining the cool, intelligent and avant-garde personalities they have always been. While periodically continuing to provide their fans with new ideas both through reissues, merchandising and new recordings of old concerts from their sites, they have cleverly, and perhaps naturally, transformed themselves into four cultural incubators, four elegantly deconstructed influencers, perfectly in step with a entertainment society full of communication and devoid of real skills.

A happy limbo that even the recent release of Thurston Moore's autobiography, “Sonic Life”, does nothing but confirm, through the consecration of his mystical aura of artistic incubator and permanent cultural witness. “Sonic Life” is, in fact, the long-awaited response to Kim Gordon's book “Girl in a Band”, released in 2015, elaborated with a perfect, entertaining and Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative. I don't think they'll return to perform together on a tour, but, all things considered, I don't mind it at all.

The early 1970s were a hot time for Japan. The country, like the rest of the world, was seething with dissatisfied energies, with violent conflicts, with cultural, social and political frictions. The world of Jazz was no exception thanks to the advent of a series of musicians as courageous as they were innovative, determined to renew and rejuvenate a musical environment that was perhaps all too linked to Western influences. One of the telluric centers of revolts and clashes with the police, as well as a fertile laboratory of cultural pollination, was Shinjuku. Neon lights, gigantic colored writings, mega screens, music and sounds of all kinds, voices of sellers, skyscrapers. People, people everywhere. Now Shinjuku is known for being the business and shopping district in the West of Tokyo. This neighborhood is now an icon of Japanese modernity, a trope that resonates with both external and internal audiences: the teeming termite mound of a station, the city's busiest transportation hub, handling over two million commuters a day ; the consumer paradise of the many interconnected department stores in the area. A multi-layered complex of colour, movement and modernity. During the 1960s and 1970s, Shinjuku managed, however, to create a reputation as an artistic and political hotbed, an incubator of creative approaches to art born between the famous Kiinokuniya bookshop, the tiny bars and artists' hangouts of Golden-Gai (celebrated in Wim Wenders' Tokyo Ga), the jazz and classical cafés of Kabukicho and the gay bars of Nichome. The creative energies of the artists were partly fueled by the climate of revolt in the streets. The self-sacrificing mood that underpinned the postwar "economic miracle" had begun to fade into discontent with corrupt politicians and anger about the Vietnam War and American imperialism.

Against this socio-cultural and economic background, the trio-quartet group New Directions for The Arts came to life, led with ferocious determination by guitarist Takayanagi "Jojo" Masayuki. Takayanagi was one of the few Japanese jazz musicians to push against the rigid constraints of orthodox swing, bop, and modal jazz. Born in 1932 in Tokyo, Takayanagi dropped out of high school at age 16 to become a musician. Turning professional after three years of hard study, cutting his teeth in jazz groups such as Nishi Ryosaburo's Quintet, Daddy Little Combo and Sakuma Makio's Jokers Quintet, the young Takayanagi soon earned a reputation for his extraordinary technique and ability to sight-read any music placed in front of him. Despite having a prestigious and comfortable career behind him, his musical restlessness led him to form a series of short-lived groups, all characterized by a very high desire for musical innovation. The time sheet drawn up by Yasunori Saito, included in the beautiful box set of three LPs Station '70: Call In Question / Live Independence, produced in 2023 by Black Editions, places the date of birth of this group as June 1971, with the trio formed by Takayanagi, Mori Kenji (horns) and Yamazaki Hiroshi (drums).

The trio tested their strengths on August 14, 1971, participating in the Nippon Genyasai festival in Sanritsuka, Chiba, with a performance partially traceable in the double CD/DVD box set “Various – 1971 幻野　幻の野は現出したか '71日本幻野祭 三里塚で祭れ” , produced by the Hayabusa Landings record company in 2003 and, above all, in the CD “Complete "La Grima"", released in 2007, for Doubtmusic.

On May 19, 1972, Takayanagi entered the Aoi Studio, for this group's debut album: “Free Form Suite”, which would quickly become another significant album for Japanese free jazz.

Accompanying him were Kenji Mori, (Clarinet, Flute, Soprano Saxophone, Alto Saxophone, Piccolo Flute, Recorder), and on drums Hiroshi Yamazaki and Joe Mizuki. Kenji Mori (born 1942) was a versatile musician whose primary instrument was the alto saxophone, but equally at ease with the tenor saxophone, various flutes, clarinet, and even recorders. He appeared on many Three Blind Mice records as a sideman, but rarely as a leader. Joe Mizuki, also associated with Takayanagi several times, passed away on March 20, 1997.

The album is another shining example of the musical heterogeneity that characterizes Takayanagi. Soejima Teruto writes in his book “Free Jazz in Japan”:

“As he wrote three years later, "...the author (Takayanagi) had his long cherished dream come true as the trio with Yoshizawa Motoharu and Toyozumi Yoshisaburo continued to rehearse in preparation for the recording at Teichiku in September of 1969 of his first work as leader, Independence. At that time, and continuing to this day, the goal has been finding concrete expression for the stillness and motion inherent in a space, in 'gradual projection' and, later on, in 'mass projection.' By mixing and combining these two approaches, truly infinite possibilities opened up. From one individual conception new techniques of playing developed, new choices of various new powerful tools, discoveries, creativity...." (from the liner notes to Free Form Suite)”

A year later the group participates in one of the most important musical events in Japan: Inspiration & Power 14 FreeJazz Festival, organized by Soejima Teruto himself. The festival occurred in Shinjuku, from June 27 to July 12, 1973, at a place called "Art Theater Shinjuku Bunka Gekijo". The festival lasted fourteen nights. Live performances began each evening at 9pm after all of the day's movies had been screened. It was an extraordinary event in the history of Japanese jazz. Sixteen groups performed, mostly Japanese free jazz musicians.

Teruto Soejima, founder of both the New La Jazz Hall and then, after its closure in May of the Shibuya “Pulcinella" (a small theater of the Hitomi-za puppet company), decided to bring together the artists close to him and hold a " Free Jazz Festival", a great rebirth of free jazz to reinvigorate and re-inspire the community of musicians who agreed to perform at the festival. New Directions for The Arts was also invited to perform on July 9, 1973.

As evidence of those fourteen nights of intense artistic creativity, a double LP was released by Trio Records, containing some of the performances of eight of these groups, including about ten minutes of Takayanagi's performance (about an hour long) and associates, with the title “Inspiration & Power 14 Free Jazz Festival 1”.

For nearly forty years it was thought that a complete recording of the set was not available. Until now. Some time ago Yasunori Saito, owner of the independent record company Jinya Disc, which for years has undertaken laudable and careful research and reprinting of Takayangi's music on CD, communicated to Otomo Yoshide the discovery of a cassette, found among Mr. Takayanagi after his death, a complete recording of this legendary live performance. The problem was the music recorded on the cassette was not fully available, some takes were cut in half and other fragments started in the middle, furthermore, the cassette started silently, giving a very different impression from the ten minutes contained on the double LP “Inspiration & Power 14 Free Jazz Festival 1”. It felt like the entire set had been recorded on tape, split into several parts, and then dubbed onto cassette. The volume of the different fragments also varied from one to the next, and there were points where the volume of one channel was noticeably low. Not at all discouraged, Yoshihide managed to patiently solve each of these mysteries, carefully repairing and connecting all the fragments one by one, obtaining a complete live recording of almost an hour, recreating, thanks also to the invaluable services of the mastering engineer Shigeki Nakamura, the sound as close as possible to live performance and Takayanagi's preferred sonic signature, resulting in one of Masayuki Takayanagi's best works, in its entirety.

This recording was recently produced on CD by Jinya Disc under the title “Projection: The Complete Inspiration and Power Live”, proving to be a valuable resource not only for fans of Takajangi's music, but also for understanding the overall picture of performances in that particular historical moment.

In this performance, unlike what was recorded in “Free Form Suite”, which maintained a more traditional structure, the performance begins with the dry and sharp drums of Hiroshi Yamazaki and the more percussive forms of Joe Mizuki, followed by sober and abstract. This development gradually increases in speed, volume and heat as time passes. In the second half of the performance the band enters the world of "collective projection", up to an incandescent "mass projection". A glowing orb of musical mass brought to a critical level of condensation and gravitational accumulation, on the verge of collapsing at any moment. The result is a state of flow that moves in search of an "inner space-time" that transcends real time and space and expands endlessly without beginning or end. A powerful, intense and grandiose album and performance, an extraordinary explosion of high-volume, super-speed energy that breaks through all musical rules and restrictions known so far.

It is not surprising that Soejima comments on their performance in this way in his book “Free Jazz in Japan”:“On the eleventh night, New Direction for the Arts played an incredibly loud set, leading everybody to an intellectual pleasure beyond the extremes of tension. They even rewired the brains of the audience for a time, with their extreme speed. Co-producer of the record with Inaoka, Harada Kazuo, told of going home and having a strange dream, "I was in my body traveling through space at terrific speed when I realized that my head was extended in front of me in a long point, with sparks flying all around." I think probably a lot of the listeners felt something like that during the performance. When Takayanagi heard that story, he just nodded, without smiling, and said, "Well naturally. Last night we played really well and in a light speed dimension."”

This live recording was also the swan song of New Direction for the Arts. In September 1973 Joe Mizuki left the group, which changed its name to New Direction Unit. But that's another story.

Contrary to what many people think, I am not a compulsive music listener. I don't use Spotify, I don't download mp3s, I still listen to music from a Hi Fi system in my studio. When I want to write about music, I go to my studio, put a CD in the player and let the music fill my ears, then I sit at the desk and write a text, full of all the ideas that the music itself has aroused in me. For almost forty years I have been using two old B&W DM 100 speakers and a Rotel RA 820 amplifier, an old-fashioned system, I admit, and now that I think about it, I think that music has had their timbre for me for forty years now. As a result, I can no longer imagine music, any music with a different sound: my ear has become accustomed to their particular vibration.

It's also true that I wouldn't know how else to listen to music like that of “Esercizi per esistere”", an album released in 2024, again for the Italian Dissipatio, an independent record label that, for some time, has colonized my sound spaces. “Esercizi per esistere” is, in fact, not just an album that focuses on synesthetic qualities, combining the music by Elio Martuscello, the drawings and collages by Peter Bartlett and the poems by Nazim Comunale. Listening to the music is, therefore, essential from reading and viewing the beautiful booklet that accompanies the CD, which does not limit itself to accompanying Martusciello's forms of sound art, but integrates them into a complex perceptive and sensorial journey.

It's true that much of this phenomenon has an involuntary nature, but I think listening to the sounds by Elio Martusciello, seeing the colors by Peter Bartlett, reading the words by Nazim Comunale can open the doors to much deeper personal reflections than those obtained from a simple listening via headphones, perhaps going to or returning from work on a crowded bus. I believe that “Esercizi per esistere” is a work that is mainly based on sensorial contamination and therefore requires a much more conscious and time-spanning approach, animated by a spirit of experimentation and innovation aimed at bringing the happy owner of one of the 200 CDs e booklets produced well outside his/her comfort zone. Certainly outside my bubble of listening predominantly based on guitars, guitars present here but whose sound has been transcended, transformed into something very different both from a musical and cultural point of view. An extended dystopian transposition aided by the alienating beautiful, confidential voice of Alexandra Staraşciuc. In short, “Esercizi per esistere” is truly a path of cultural, sensorial and perceptive exercises made to remind us that life and therefore also listening to music is a very different thing from what our society continues to push us on a daily basis.

It's true. I realize that there may be other, perhaps better, ways to listen to music, but I prefer to do it this way, in the tranquility of my studio. While I was writing these notes on “Esercizi per esistere” I realized that my vision of music is probably very similar to the particular sound emitted by my old and reliable stereo system. I think that it almost does not evolve and that my memory always returns, periodically to the same focal points, making my listening points on a map that gradually continues to widen, increasingly unaware, by now, of the temporal evolutions that our cultures and societies propose to us . A map that now also integrates these "exercises", which in turn are anchored to other coordinates showing other possible routes and derivations. I certainly haven't finished listening carefully yet.