Matteo Liberatore: Solos
Innova
An album of acoustic guitar solos—could a recording be any more straightforward? Well, yes, when the guitarist in question is Matteo Liberatore, a native of Abruzzo, Italy and current Brooklyn resident who plays in the experimental electronic band Una Lux when not investigating the sonic potential of the acoustic guitar. Anything but pastoral serenades, the forty-four-minute Solos sees Liberatore extending the instrument's natural sonorities by applying to it everything from metal springs and a kick drum beater to alligator clips and a bass bow; given such a scenario, one's naturally reminded of John Cage and other aficionados of ‘prepared' techniques. That the results are unusual doesn't surprise; if there is one, it's that fellow guitar explorer Elliott Sharp, who mixed and mastered the release, didn't also sit in on a track or two.
It takes little time at all for the album's daring character to assert itself: in Liberatore's hands, the opening “Agnes” becomes a dulcimer-like conduit for his musings, the fluttering swirl generated accompanied by an occasional knock on the guitar body. “Gravity” pairs the sparse plucking of single notes with a taut, spidery backdrop, the notes in the latter sounding as if they're ricocheting inside a hollow drum barrel. “Coral” most startles for the fact that the guitar is presented free of alteration (the later “Causeway” also) and thus offers a rare opportunity for Liberatore's picking prowess to be appreciated. The subsequent “Barrea” re-establishes the project's experimental tone in presenting bowed creakings that suggest the wails of anguished ghouls; even more stripped down is “Alberto,” whose strum-accented scrapes and rustlings call to mind ghost towns collapsing into ruins, and “Fisherman,” whose bowed expressions sound like whistlings across a grave or two.
As adventurous and steeped in the avant-garde tradition as Solos is, it's also much more accessible than one might expect, though that's attributable in part to the uncluttered presentation a recording featuring a single instrument provides, even one where said instrument is altered as extremely as this one; the concise running-time of the album's twelve tracks also works in its favour. It's debatable whether Solos would benefit from a video accompaniment: while on the one hand it would be fascinating to learn how exactly he generated the album's soundworld, a good amount of mystery—and fun, for that matter—would be lost in the process.March 2018