Neuguitars 2024 #21 the abstract and minimalist ideas of Giuseppe Ielasi

Italians do it better...

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.