Electro-acoustic artist David Font and guitar virtuoso Jose Luis Rodríguez have taken flamenco music into a bold new realm of performed deconstruction, offering a live dialogue between a primordial tradition’s multi-layered history and the crackle and hum of our 21st century digital soundscape. Rodriguez’s lush, polyrhythmic patterns and ornate chords provide the project’s whole cloth, while Font tugs and pulls at the strands in real time, deconstructing, altering and re-introducing Rodriguez’s expert playing as both rhythmic counterpoint and delicate washes of electronic echo and fuzz.
The duo’s work expands the state of the art for both electro-acoustic technique and flamenco tradition, creating a fluid new musical dialect. They create experimental music that works on its own terms—not for novelty’s sake, but in search of beauty and transcendence in the moment. The results are hypnotic, strange, and surprisingly elegant. All of the recordings are realized in real time (i.e., no overdubs), allowing the artists’ affinity and decades-long experience to shape the music through a process based more on intuition and sensitivity than fixed design: electronics radically transform acoustic guitar, hand claps, and finger snaps to create intuitive feedback structures able to express a sensitivity that approaches the telepathic.
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"Sonic research on the timbre and the rhythms of flamenco. Solely with the collaboration of guitarist Jose Luis Rodriguez and his prowess on six strings, the sounds were dissected and manipulated by Frost into diluted watercolors at the limits of ambient. The sounds were filtered to bring out the essence: arpeggios immersed in a sea of cotton wool that turns the guitar into an instrument reborn. Three-hundred hand-numbered copies on a disc destined to become a cult object among enthusiasts of the genre."—Rockerilla (Italy)
"... Truly breathtaking. Magnificent thing. Big disadvantage: the CD is strictly limited to 300 pieces, but there is a digital download."—Skug (Austria)
"... Weird little guitar pieces which after a while become strangely hypnotic as the previous piece drifts away under a shitload of echo and a new piece is played over the top. There is something very original and unusual about the album, creating a whole new slant on electro/acoustic deconstructed music."—Norman Records (UK)
"... These abstractions field the power of three steps of interpretation, one by Rodríguez, one by Font, and one by us; the product is eerily reminiscent of the source, an ethereal presence of arid mountains, of people working in the fields of Andalucía, singing themselves away under the sun as the silhouette of cities and the humming of a million machines engulf their toils. No longer here, only an ages-old resonance remains… a thought of living music, a historian’s spectacular dream ..."—A Closer Listen
"... undeniably comforting and beautiful ... an innovative work."—Popmatters
credits
released December 5, 2012
jose luis rodriguez: guitar
david font: electronics
supported by 5 fans who also own “flamenco abstractions”
This truly beautiful album feels like a hidden gem of texture, tones and of course, patience. Upon the first listen I instantly fell in love with it and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys untethered music that flows with its own current. glumburger
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