Today is the release date of my latest record, called Seaward on the Waves, a push forward in order to explore new realms for creativity after the ashes of a malfunctioning past have been scattered and left behind. A collection of 10 instrumental songs in a more acoustic approach, yet with some electronic takeover, sound processing, field recordings, and a string quartet on several of the tracks.
You’ll hear acoustic and electric guitars, Oud, banjo, Weissenborn, Mountain dulcimer, Shruti box, waterphone, synths, violin, viola and cello which propel my musical ships in their renovated hulls towards uncharted territory.
[Cover painting by Alejandro Pasquale / Layout & design by Xisco Rojo]
Listen here: Bandcamp / Spotify
On the songs
Side A
1. Bilagáana
GCGCD (Banjo, bow, synthesizers, sound processing, field recording)
The Navajo word for white people or people of European descent. Feeling foreign to oneself, or a sensed otherness of the self, due to the effects of nervous dissociation, is the theme here.
2. Can Rovelló
EBEEBE (6-string acoustic guitar, sound processing, field recording)
A shaky and helpless -but fiery- little dog at a house in the countryside of Tarragona becomes the metaphor of the cliffs of human existence and our struggle for survival.
3. She Moved Through the Airwaves
CGCGCE (12-string acoustic guitar, synthesizers, sound processing, field recording, radio sweeps)
A well-known traditional tune about a woman walking about the market fair in Dublin becomes here a blurry, distant resonance, representing the impermanence of hope, love, healing, life, you name it…
4. Dejando.Yermas.Las.Antiguas.Normas
DADFAC# (6-string acoustic guitar, 4-string partial capo on 4th fret, violin, viola, cello)
A song to my late cat, who accompanied me for 18 years. Somehow, its passing defined a transitional moment, which is what the title of the song refers to, as well as serving as acrostic for my furry pal’s name.
5. Témenos
CFADGC (Oud, synthesizers, waterphone, sound processing, field recording)
A piece of land marked off from common uses and dedicated to a god, such as a sanctuary, holy grove, or holy precinct. Carl Jung relates the témenos to the spellbinding or magic circle, which acts as a “square space” where “mental work» can take place.
Side B
1. Tzu-jan / Wu-wei
CGCGG#C (Weissenborn, Shruti box, field recording)
Two key concepts in Taoism; Tzu-jan literally means»of its own; by itself» and thus ”naturally, spontaneously, freely, in the course of events». Wu-wei means”inexertion, inaction», or»effortless action».
2. Sickutta Samaria
DADFAD (12-string electric guitar, 4-string partial capo on 4th fret, bow, viola, cello)
A phrase in Basque-Icelandic pidgin literally meaning “go fuck a horse”. In this case, it serves as a mantra for protection and elevation from mundane and mental bullshit.
3. Bog Myrtle
CGDGCD (6-string acoustic guitar, 4-string partial capo on 2nd fret, viola, cello)
A woody deciduous perennial shrub from the Myricaceae family. It thrives in damp or boggy soils, and the Vikings are said to have used it to treat depression and poor memory, and to give a sense of well-being to their ill.
4. Dance Of The Dunlins
AEAEAC# (12-string acoustic guitar, synthesizer)
Also called murmuration, flocking behavior in shorebirds is one of the most beautiful ballets in nature, a simple yet elaborate dance that begs to be set to music.
5. Seikilos’ Epitaph
DADD (Mountain Dulcimer, synthesizer, sound processing, field recording)
The oldest surviving complete musical composition, including musical notation, from anywhere in the world, dated around the 1st or the 2nd century. The song was found engraved on a tombstone alongside these words: “While you live, shine / have no grief at all / life exists only for a short while / and Time demands its due.”
Thank You
Bárbara and Maia, my parents and family, Paulo González, Tony Ruiz, Alejandro Pasquale, Sara Muñiz, Adrián F. Balsera, Fernando Junquera, Óscar Barras, Javier Sasso, Marisa Anderson, Víctor Herrero, Raoul Eden, Buck Curran, Daniel Goldmann, Enrique Vaz Oliver, La Faena II, Carl Jung and my late cat, Dylan.
ALBUM NOTES BY TONY J. RUIZ
An unstoppable push toward expansion in multiple directions marks the genre of guitar soli in the past decades. Far from being tied to the recreation of the canon, this school has been enriched by the incorporation of elements that have become intrinsic to a vision that transcends traditions, borders and margins, but also, diversifying the sources of inspiration to the same degree of impropriety and exoticism as the masters of yesteryear. The former “solitude” now tends to be accompanied by more instruments, resulting in areas that are impossible to transcribe if not surrendered to the amazement that this new cosmology illuminates. The generation of outstanding “primitive guitarists” of the last decades, be they called Daniel Bachman, Norberto Lobo, Mariano Rodríguez, Derek Monypeny or Jim Ghedi, have all come to expose the potential of this cartography that obliterates the void (or highlights it), spreading a voracious mystery, indicated in folds, overlaps and bifurcations, conjugated with the basic inspirational core of the routes along the fretboards. Between unsubsumable dialectics, Babelian colloquiums, visionary dialogues or quilted monologues, guitar soli begins to be a syntagm that provides little understanding of the greater phenomenon it points at.
Xisco Rojo is a paradigmatic figure in this sense: with a keen reflection on the matter surrounding the geography of instrumental music, he creates an aesthetic that takes advantage of the smallest detail. In his case, the set of timbral looms is carried by a multitude of elements: Shruti boxes, bowed instruments, synths and field recordings are added due to the curiosity aroused by the textural superposition, and not due to compositional inertia or mere theme variation. At the expense of an allegorical spirit that decomposes the structure of listening, impelling to “look” inside, in Seaward On The Waves another distinctive note also operates according to which, once set into motion, the lines of attack retract before any hint of underlining is available. A powerful attenuation of the material that accounts for that “little more” or “almost nothing” that, cutting back on discursive expression, requires objectifying what is purely given instead of the hand of the person who creates it. For example, on Bilagáana, which opens the album, the stillness of a field recording anchored to a drone is approached by the chirping of a bird. But when a banjo bursts in with an epic phrase, as the pennant of a newly planted tree, the bird’s labored heartbeat seems to penetrate the strings, activating a stuttering mechanism foreign to its ebb and flow.
This impressionistic, refractory or -if you will- retreating tone palette diminishes or even cuts off developments and progressions in favor of a naturalistic language: Dejando.Yermas.Las.Antiguas.Normas is crossed by a Hindu-style melodic phrase of broad significances, but it crowns its drama with a string quartet that embraces the motif with unexpected subtlety. Overcoming the cultural overexposure of the modern ear, the unrecognizable and the genuine individuality of the varnish remains there, still pointing at new openings found practically at the risk of the previous arrangement. This is the case of Sickutta Samaria, led by a 12-string electric guitar of distant brilliance until another string quartet joins in to finish, again, having barely outlined the crescendo. Tzu-jan/Wu-wei, with Shruti box and Weissenborn, lazily configures a series of intriguing arpeggios, then tracing a sudden change of tempo that summons successive progressions, each starker than the previous one. The tide that we hear in Seikilos’ Epitaph works in the same direction, making some dulcimer notes run aground to let it be the water, collecting to form another wave, the one that closes the album. Frozen in that moment only for a few seconds, we acknowledge that no sound translates only into a single meaning.
Established as a sort of perpetual promise in the face of the impermanence that we suffer in todays’ world, Rojo proposes a symbiotic sleepwalking, one could even say a supernaturally proselytizing manifesto, where the devices, substances, creatures and people that populate the spaces of his music emanate with the fullness of their own universe, which paradoxically sumons life by becoming alien. Just as it happens in the ironic proxemics of She Moved Through The Airwaves, he keeps a revelry of festive voices in the foreground and, in the background, an exploding swarm tangled by the heavily processed sound of a 12-string acoustic guitar. Or τέμενος, with the echoes of a cloister of Sufi chants surrounding a solitary Oud, which delves just enough into a fascination with the Middle East, Hamza El Din or Sandy Bull’s perennial Blend. Can Rovelló, a raga introduced with a certain sadness, lightly blurs his appearance as it advances. As in Rabindranath Tagore’s writings, the contrasts of the journey translate into more luminous questions, along with a liberating sensation where improvisation plays an essential part. In Bog Myrtle, perhaps the most “classic” -but no less dazzling- cut, we find echoes of the most placid and intimate of Robbie Basho’s ruminations. Finally, in Dance Of The Dunlins, perhaps the most expressive number of the lot, the twangs of the 12-string guitar draw their rhythmic chromaticism from the intervals and joints of the chords rather than from the sepia tone they exude.
At the opposite extreme of Folk-Lore (Holy Hoof, 2023), beautifully adjusted to the vertices and symmetries of song standards (voice included), in Seaward On The Waves a less sharp-edged organism than мать может я (Holy Hoof, 2022; cassette ed., Philatelia Records, 2023), predominates, although of related flight, but the latter of more tense height. Absorbed by the compassionate cauterization of the dimensions of time and place, or in the brittle split of the human with respect to the land it occupies, Rojo manages to transcend them again and again, because the instruments themselves achieve a pact that is no more strange than lasting. Through the work of the Madrilenian guitarist, more than the deep awareness of the means of the production of sound, what circulates is an entire mystique clinging to the chemistry that exists between them.
Tony J. Ruiz, Buenos Aires, December 30th, 2023