Neuguitars 2024 #33 Allegories in the world of contemporary guitar: “Allegory of Earth and Water” by Silvia Cignoli
Rohs! Records, 2024
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.
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