Jar'a

Description

Paolo Angeli fits no category but his unique instrument and often apparently impossible playing techniques underpin a deep, nuanced and completely grounded music which, while never far from a folk root, is enriched with so many strands drawn from the musical depths that it escapes genre and seems to talk directly to a shared Western contemporary musical sensibility. On this release - his thirteenth for us - Paolo takes a new turn, this time liminally orchestral (he should be composing music for film) full of moods, minute attention to detail and unexpected switches of vocabulary.

Taking the form of a six-part suite for prepared Sardinian guitar, vocals, some electronics and occasional guest, Sardinian throat singer Omar Bandinu, this CD follows a more meditative path than his earlier releases. This is really music for a darkened room: immersive and borderline psychedelic. I don't know of anyone else who could make such a sustained and self-contained statement of dreamlike suspension make time pass so easily. Exquisitely recorded and mixed; and with a deep subtext if you want it. Highly impressive. Born in 1970, Paolo started to play guitar when he was nine, finally evolving his highly customised version of the Sardinian prepared-guitar: an eighteen-string orchestra of guitar, baritone, cello and drums rolled into one, with various hammers, pedals and varispeed propellers added .

He has a degree in Ethnomusicology and as a researcher, has published a critical volume of historical analyses of the 'Canto a Chitarra', which includes 4 CDs of recordings made between 1930 and 1967. He is artistic co-director of Isole che parlano, an international arts festival in Palau, now in its fifteenth year and, apart form his various records, performs regularly in Europe, America, Canada, Russia and Brasil, alone and with collaborators who have included Pat Metheny, Fred Frith, Jon Rose, Otomo Yoshide, Antonello Salis, Hamid Drake, Evan Parker, Ned Rothemberg, Takumi Fukushima, Zeena Parkins, Nuno Rebelo, Lukas Simonis, Andy Ex, Verian Weston, Robert Dick, Lukas Ligeti, Audrey Chen, Janet Fader and Camel Zekri.