Giueseppe Ielasi

August

12k

For many years, Italian composer Giuseppe Ielasi has been lending his abstract guitar improvisation skills to numerous fruitful stage and record collaborations that include some of the world’s most renowned experimental musicians, from Phil Niblock to Taku Sugimoto to Dean Roberts. As well as work on his own Fringes label, Ielasi has released a number of albums on Hapna and the underrated Sedimental imprint. Now he gives us his fourth full-length August, which is composed of five nameless tracks all clocking in between six and eight minutes. It may have been recorded in Lisbon, tiny Scheifling (Austria), Stockholm, his home town Milan, and even Vulcano, a tiny volcanic island off the coast of Sicily, but any sense of place on individual tracks is lost in the homogenous, cloudy ambience and melancholia of the sound.

The heavily treated guitar still forms the backbone of Ielasi’s approach, but here it is joined by piano, organ, shortwave radio, and even the dobro, or resonator guitar, all heavily processed and smoothly blended to form fluid drones and drifting textures. One of the album’s strengths is this seamless ebb and flow of one track into another despite their often contrasting moods. Similarly, each track builds and decays within itself, giving each one an epic and oozing quality. Despite the liquid fluidity, there are subtle moments of prickly electronica and radio static that gently agitate the otherwise smooth-skinned qualities of the instrumentation.

The opening track blends backward guitar drones and gentle raindrop bass and piano with rasping insect textures to create a somnolent ambience. Track 2 brings the burning fuzz guitar to the fore and sounds, incredibly, like a better-produced Flying Saucer Attack piece. Heima Waller’s endless and melancholy trumpet on the third track is a particular highlight of the album, as it pans through seaside sounds and feeling so heavy and far away it conjures a similar feeling as William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops. Track 4 is the shortest and sparsest and therefore the loneliest piece, while the album closes on a slightly lighter note, the drones and crystal organ notes fizzing with unanswered shortwave transmissions, as if trying to re-establish contact with the outside world.

Ultimately, it’s impossible to pick a highlight from such a well-worked and evocative album, especially one where every moment leaves you a little haunted and moved.

Chris Mann