Kevin Kastning: 17/66
Greydisc Records

Kevin Kastning, the Massachusetts-based innovator renowned for his remarkable thirty- and thirty-six string guitars, has issued four solo albums, including 17/66, which is also, it turns out, his twenty-ninth for Greydisc Records. With a discography of such magnitude under his belt, certainly one recurring challenge for Kastning has to be figuring out what to do next, and even more pointedly figuring out what ground he might cover in a new recording that hasn't been exhaustively explored already.

Serendipity often comes into play in such cases, and Kastning is no exception. Encountering by accident the Wotruba Cathedral in Vienna led to the further crystallization of an idea about compositional structure he'd begun developing in 2014; as he studied the cathedral, he began to see its design and structure as a physical manifestation of a concept he labeled ‘harmonic blocks.' While Kastning doesn't elaborate in detail on the mechanics of the idea, one presumes it generally has to do with conceiving the music in logically structured terms and assembling it with the kind of rigour and precision that's involved in the building of architectural structures. For this hour-long release, Kastning recorded the three tripartite pieces live in the studio with no overdubs and used a different guitar for each: the thirty-string Contra-Alto guitar for “1230z”; the seventeen-string Hybrid Extended Classical guitar for “ML/G-137”; and the thirty-six-string Double Contraguitar for “CotHT.”

Truth be told, 17/66 doesn't sound radically dissimilar from Kastning's previous solo recordings, and while the ‘harmonic blocks' concept no doubt played a significant part in the guitarist's thinking about the project during its formative stages and eventual execution, for the listener 17/66 will likely sound more like the next natural chapter in an ongoing story. And that's no bad thing: anyone who's derived pleasure from Kastning's previous recordings will find as much to appreciate here too. The customary signatures of his approach are very much present in these real-time explorations, each one a record of thinking translated into physical form. And as always a central part of the pleasure a Kastning release provides comes from simply attending to the beautiful, glistening sound the guitarist coaxes from his multi-string instruments; further to that, he eschews high-speed flash for a methodical, ponderous execution that enables those guitar sounds to be savoured in their fullest form.

June 2018