Zsófia Boros's Website
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Daniel Voth, "Harmonic Dreams," 2024

Harmonic Dreams, the fifth album by acoustic fingerstyle guitarist Daniel Voth, comprises fourteen tiny pieces that shimmer like sun on a field of grass and form an extended composition at turns eerie, soothing, sweet, and unsettling. The album as a whole is given cohesiveness by various ruminative "Harmonic Dreams" sprinkled throughout (numbered 1-3 and ending with "Harmonic Dreams REM," perhaps meant to suggest the dream-state of REM sleep). Harmonics are integral throughout, those bell-like chiming sounds that are so spectacular in guitar instrumental music. The album employs a slew of musicians to add layers and textures (among them Andy Ellison, pedal steel; Nick Harris, electric guitar; Maria Grigoryeva, strings; Anup Sastry, drums; Meredith Moore, French horn; Merethe Soltvedt, vocals). The interplay creates an orchestral effect of which the guitar is foundational. In his notes, Voth says he was influenced by the work of Hans Zimmer, and an overarching cinematic effect is exactly what he achieves on this ambitious project. He recorded the guitar parts with Antoine Dufour (also part of the CandyRat Records stable) and developed the string, brass, and other aspects separately. For the guitar he uses unique tunings and a style of two-handed tapping that he came up with for his song "Brazil" on his last album, along with overlapping lines and distortion. An example, with tapping start to finish, is the propulsive "In the Zone," almost techno in sound (heavy metal bands were an early influence), which employs G G Bb D G B tuning. (He writes that each tapped note was recorded separately, programed one by one, to result in a total of 80 guitar tracks!) Like "The Flow" (D A C F Bb C tuning) the title gestures to that creative space in which time seems to stand still and everything extraneous falls away. Each of the pieces is complete in itself, with lovely melodies, graceful arpeggios, and strong dynamics. The violin accompaniment is particularly noteworthy, as are the vocals, which lend a spooky overlay on many pieces. Favorites include melodic "Valhalla," with ethereal vocalizing that sounds as if the stars themselves are singing; "On Angels' Wings," which showcases Voth's gorgeous fingerpicking, harmonics, and tapping, and has a propulsive tension throughout; and "Omega," which opens with an organ-like sound and choral vocalizing heightened by intricate and dramatic percussive effects. One of Voth's albums is titled Otherwordly, and perhaps that's the best word to describe his music. Experimental, original, and eye-opening, this is not your typical guitar album, and Voth is not your typical guitarist and composer. For interested guitarists, tabs and videos to watch his techniques up close are available on the Candy Rat website. For guitarists and nonguitarists alike, this album is an enthralling and immersive experience.
© Céline Keating

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Listen to "Flow"
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Pino Forastiere & Tommaso Alfonsi, "Conversation," 2024

I have a hard enough time keeping track of six strings, but on Pino Forastiere's new album, Conversation, a collaboration with Tommaso Alfonsi, he is playing a 19-string guitar. Alfonsi, no stranger to the 19-string himself (see his 2022 album, Incerti Suoni), plays electric guitar. Both players go wild with the effects: there are relay-races of delay, thick clouds of reverb, stutters and reverses. The result is a collaboration that falls way outside genre boundaries. There are threads of contemporary classical (I hear the minimalism of Glass, but also strains of Ravel, Debussy, and perhaps other Impressionist-era composers, especially in the title track), jazz (I get a strong John Abercrombie vibe at times), and a kind of restless ambient exploration of soundscapes that covers mythological vistas from Hades to Heaven. What I love about this music is that the wood and the wild, the acoustic and the electric, weave together seamlessly. One minute we're in a modern-fingerstyle haven of calm delight ("Corale") while the next ("Valzer per una nuvola," which I translate as "Waltz for a Cloud") we're in a sky full of whales calling for home. The pianistic depths of the 19-string's bass contrast beautifully with Alfonsi's electric picking, especially in the counterpoint of "Conversation" and the arpeggiations of "Rito." Speaking of whales, I've noticed a trend in contemporary instrumental music, a desire to sound not like something human-made but rather like something recorded deep in a forest, an ocean, a sky, like animals known and not telling us mere humans the true story of what it means to be alive. I attribute this strain not only to the influence of so-called world music (check out the didgeridoo-like timbre of the effected guitar in the second half of "Pre Rito") but to something deeper and more profound, as well: the loss of the natural world, the sense of impending doom as heat and weather become always more intense but, too, to the encroachment and intertangling of the "cooked" human world with the "raw" of the wild. Where cougars, elk, moose, bobcats and coyotes were nearly extinct where I live in the western U.S. they now stalk pets and graze on yard clippings. Forastiere and Alfonsi make welcome this wild unpredictability; they are masters of their instruments, for sure, but also servants to the sound. So there is not only a conversation between two players here, but two players converging with something much larger, more wild, and often both much more frightening and enlightening than the shrunken-head poverty of a lot of contemporary music.
© Brian Clark