A Closer Listen
Low key yet lyrical melodies balance on the cusp between accessible and weird, at turns mournful and celebratory. Untitled tracks allow the listener to project whatever they’re feeling onto this music. And despite being informed that all sounds come from electric and acoustic guitars, there remains an ambiguity to the sound sources that makes room for surprise. On Down On Darkened Meetings, Giuseppe Ielasi‘s first solo LP for Oren Ambarchi‘s excellent Black Truffle label, we find the restless Italian experimenter continue his rekindled exploration of the guitar, an instrument he had long since put down in favor of microphones, small sounds, and signal processing.
In fact, back in the 1990s, when Ielasi was first coming up on the impro scene, the guitar was his main instrument. At that time, many audiences regarded performances based around the laptop as “inauthentic” and soulless. It made sense that electronic artists like Ambarchi, Fennesz, or Squarepusher continued to play the guitar despite their growing reliance on digital tools, as the instrument allows for some level of audience identification, a link between gesture and sound that is no longer strictly necessary. But by the naughts, electronic music had become accepted enough that many artists let the guitar fall away, particularly as it carries with it a whole load of complicated cultural baggage.
Stage-oriented theatrics and mastabatory guitar solo virtuosics couldn’t be further removed from the aesthetic realm Ielasi has carved out for himself. In fact, he generally eschews performing on stage, prefering to be in the crowd, or at least able to hear himself from the same perspective as the audience. This emphasis on controlling the listening experience extends to Ielasi’s recordings, and is also reflected by his status as an in-demand mastering engineer. But we’re in the 2020s now, and electronic music has become so mainstream that the sight of a laptop on stage has become so commonplace as to not require pointing out. Ielasi’s releases in recent years—Untitled (2020) for ErstWhile’s Amplify, Five Wooden Frames (2020) and The Prospect (2022) for Taylor Deupree’s 12k—have explored various compositional processes, but share a return of the guitar as the primary sound source.
The cover of Frames is a color photograph of an empty tennis court, while The Prospect depicts an even more spare, snow-covered tennis court in black and white. The density of Frames’ queasy acoustic loop modulation is contrasted by the austerity of The Prospect, a record Ielasi made during the pandemic to process a loss. Two compositions recorded exactly one year apart consist solely of two parallel electric guitar lines, with no studio trickery and minimal editing. There are chords, even if dissonant modulations and close pitch interactions are never far away (perhaps not unlike a version of Satie’s Vexations for guitar). The Prospect is probably the most traditional record in Ielasi’s extensive catalogue, but the hallmarks of his practice are all there; attention to silence, space, modulation, small sounds, repetition and difference. He also bucks his usual trend of leaving songs untitled or simply numbered, with the two compositions being titled “The Prospect” and “The Way Back,” uncharacteristically evocative titles which suggest the deeply personal nature of the album. Like the tolerance for silence that punctuates these compositions—letting sustained notes decay and fade out, waiting just a tad longer than expected before sounding a new one—this specificity is fitting for a record inspired by loss.
Bellows, Ielasi’s long running duo with the great Nicola Ratti, has tended to center process explicitly in their records; Handcut dragged contact mics on old vinyl, Reelin’ manipulated modular melodies with reel-to-reel tape, and more recent records have leaned even harder into a micro-sound dub aesthetic. Like Giuseppe Ielasi’s solo work from 2020, Undercurrent (Black Truffle, 2020) was also a return to the use of acoustic instruments, equally remarkable for how little a bearing this seems to have had on the final work. Afterall, ultimately it’s about the work itself, not the process. its appearance, reflected by three copies (2021) for Fabio Perletta‘s 901 Editions is an electronic work whose original materials were recorded in 2018, but were composed in May 2021, yet doesn’t feel at all out of step with these other records. Some of the same techniques deployed with austere guitar lines on The Prospect can also be found at work there (even if it’s closer in spirit to records such as 3 pauses and Even When They Speak Of Space). And so regardless of the process he utilizes, there remains a commonality across his works that is irreducible to instrument or process. Perhaps for an artist who often prefers to leave his compositions “untitled,” it should come as no surprise that the emphasis should remain on the sounds themselves.
Despite appearances, Ielasi has never been a rigid formalist. One might sense the traces of systems in Ielasi’s process, but (in a characteristically Italian manner) he is willing to bend the rules where necessary, never beholden to a preordained structure if a a deviation will produce a better result. What makes Down On Darkened Meetings stand out among Ielasi’s work of this decade is the catholic (in the sense of universal) approach. Whereas Five Wooden Frames explored acoustic guitar timbres via layering loops, and The Prospect honed an austere electric guitar duet with himself, here Ielasi draws on all the tools in his arsenal. His sonic pallet is limited to acoustic and electric guitar, yet a myriad of pedals and signal processing techniques help bury the sonic provenance, allowing the listener to put aside the how and simply bask in the warmth of his gently evolving explorations of tone.
A self-professed fan of hip-hop and IDM, Ielasi channels these influences in unexpected ways which are easy to miss, particularly since he generally eschews the uses of sequencers. Instead, he deploys various means of layering, looping, and building soundworlds that owes as much to free improvisation as to these various genres of studio composition. Darkened Meetings is full of warm resonant tones that call to mind Deep Magic or Vladislav Delay at their most unhurried, luxuriating in sound and repetition but without the succumbing to the too-perfect tyranny of the machine-dictated grid. Reference points for Ielasi’s return to the instrument include fellow idiosyncratic guitar players such as Raymond Boni (French free jazz) and Henry Kaiser (the prolific and impossible to nail down American innovator, but this Cuneiform release from 1992, collecting decades of solo work, is the place to begin). Despite some commonality with these players, his sound is all his own, and Down on Darkened Meetings will stand as the moment when Ielasi fully subsumed the guitar into his wider practice. A jewel in an already sterling discography, we’ll be enjoying this record for a long time, while anxiously awaiting whatever terra incognita Ielasi leads us into next. (Joseph Sannicandro)
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Sun Sep 10 00:01:24 GMT 2023