Tag: acoustic guitar

Ernesto Schnack – Worldbuilding (acoustic post-rock)

I’m going to begin this review by talking about myself. This is essentially a very bad habit in a critic, and except inasmuch as it is sometimes necessary to lay ones theoretical cards on the table, I try to avoid it. However, in order to explain precisely on what level this album resonates with my own sensibilities, I need to describe the marked coincidence of interest between my own creative concerns and those which informed the compositions on Worldbuilding. Music criticism is a hobby, which I pursue in my spare time; my principal creative pursuit, the consuming passion of my life, which occupies much of …

Marius Noss Gundersen – Visual Music – Retrato Brasileiro (classical/ MPB)

Visual Music is, according to the sleeve notes, a collaboration with the photographer Tomas Moss; the ‘power of combining vision and audio’, we are informed, offers a broader experience than either would alone, and we are directed to the ‘Visual Music’ website to discover more about this idea. The music on the album is all either composed by Brasilians, or inspired by Brasil, and on the website there are a lot of very beautifully composed photographs of Brasil and Brasilians. There is also a certain amount of explanatory text in Norwegian, but as it has all been inserted into the layouts as image files, I wasn’t able to paste it into Google for one of its Pythonesque translations.

Matt Stevens – Live In Blackpool (progressive/ post-rock/ acoustic)

What’s the point of live albums? As music fans, we usually hope for a number of things, but they mostly revolve around an anticipated sense of greater authenticity. This is the musician doing it for real: you can hear whether or not they really know their stuff, or whether it was all studio trickery. If you’re a real geek for a particular artist, you’ll want to hear how they vary their performances, both from their studio recordings and from other live shows; it’s also an opportunity to hear how much they improvise; to hear how the band interacts on stage…

Yonks – Yonks Marluk (electronica/ ambient)

This is the second release from Yonks, hence the name. What do you mean you don’t know what marluk means? It means ‘two’ in no less than three languages. Admittedly they’re only spoken in Greenland, but still. The guitar plus electronics duo continue to plough their distinctive and highly listenable furrow, with three more tracks of (I think) highly processed guitar and programmed beats.