Paolo Angeli
Níjar
Less than a year after the release of the album Rade, Paolo Angeli surprises with the sounds of his orchestral guitar, putting them at the service of a classic of Spanish literature: Bodas de Sangre, by Federico García Lorca. Níjar - recorded for the most part in the same studio session as the previous album and completed in February 2023 - goes back to the roots, that is, to the chronicle event that inspired the poet to write the work and that, in fact, took place in Níjar, in Andalusia. The Sa…
Talea
Recorded in Australia, Brasil, Italy, Japan, Turkey and America on his 2015/16 world tour, these excellent recordings offer an astonishing range of styles and sounds – all somehow emanating from Angeli’s fingers and feet – and his highly modified, prepared, extended and amplified giant Sardinian guitar which – like Angeli himself – is routinely able do several very different things at once. You have to keep reminding yourself as you listen that this is just one person with one instrument, workin…
Rade
*Now available on vinyl! In process of stocking* "... Rade is arrivals and departures in sheltered coves, faces marked by sea salt and dried by the sun. It's waiting, caulking whenever needed, small repairs on deck, quick encounters, transistor radios. And then again, it's badly folded, coffee-stained nautical charts, imaginary routes in a Mediterranean Sea sailed from cove to cove, finding protection from storms in harbors, bays and inlets..."
Rade is an unexpected arrival, like a beam of sunli…
Sale Quanto Basta
Deluxe LP Gatefold. Edition of 250 copies ** Welcome to Paolo Angeli's sixth release for ReR Megacorp (2013) now in Vinyl deluxe edition! It's an extraordinary collection of pieces that explore the full range of his highly modified, extended and prepared Sardinian guitar. And although it's just him and electricity, it seldom sounds like fewer than three people playing. There are twelve fine compositions, each as crafted as a short novel, and beautifully recorded. Paolo's is a music that pretty m…
Jar'a
Jar’a is a surprising album in which the prepared Sardinian guitar, without any overdubs, achieves the tonal range and sonic pressure of a post-rock ensemble. The suite in six movements brings together avant-garde and ancient traditional singing rituals, evoking wide open spaces, combining underground worlds and the most ancestral Sardinia. Jar’a is a concept album, with three-dimensional sound, in which Paolo Angeli expresses an innovative contemporary language, inlaying it with fragile, emot…
Tessuti
The latest from Paulo on which he plays compositions by Fred Frith and Bjork - solo (though when you hear it, you definitely won't believe it) on his highly customised and extended, electrified, giant Sardinian guitar. A tour de force of technique and a musical pleasure. There is so much subtlety and so much attention to the minutiae of sound, and so much going on at any given time, that it is difficult to relate what you hear to just one person playing. Very concentrated, rewards listenin…
Itsunomanika
Paolo Angeli and ex-After Dinner/Volapuk violinist/singer Takumi Fukushima present an integrated, complex and largely composed programme of deft, focused pieces that make the most of their not inconsiderable individual talents and instruments; mostly sounding like a much larger ensemble. The sonorities of Paolo’s extended, customised, prepared giant Sardinian guitar doing extraordinary, and sometimes chameleonic, work as bass, chord accompaniment, melody instrument, viola/cello, and even percuss…
Bucato
Extraordinary player - extraordinary instrument. Paulo plays a highly modified and treated Sardinian Guitar - in many styles, some of them apparently impossible. Innovative techniques, a deeply musical sensibility and a rich, occasionally baffling, palette of sounds.
Inevitably, comparisons will be made with Fred Frith, though not by me, Paulo is his own man. A fine and original work.
NITA. L'Angelo sul Trapezio
This could hardly be more different from his first ReR CD- the extraordinary collection of solo prepared Sardinian Guitar pieces. Here, with a small orchestra of musicians (30 of Bologna's finest), is a programme of highly evolved, through composed pieces that cover half a planet of styles and influences. At one pole there are involved pieces that bring to mind Uncle Meat period Zappa, and contemporary experimental music - and at the other, the straightforward influence of traditional Sa…
Tibi
This disc will play in stereo on a CD player and with film and 5.1 surround sound (or stereo) on a DVD player or computer. The music, as always, is prodigious, sounding like a small band, but played by one person in real time (as the film attests). In this format, you can also see the instrument close-to - a highly rebuilt and extended giant Sardinian guitar - with many sympathetic and extra strings, motor driven hurdy gurdy wheels, whirling strings, springs and other appendages, played, …
S'Û
An amazing record. It’s beautifully recorded and almost impossible to believe that such a layered and polyphonic music, with chords, percussion, lead lines, bass lines, harmonies, string sections and sometimes voice could all be produced by one person in real time, without overdubs or loops. But it is. The instrument, a specially designed and augmented Sardinian guitar (almost the size of a cello) is equipped with motors, pedals, individual string mic’ing, and extra appendages; and of course the…