Review of Aufs Paradies by Agustin Castilla-Avila, 2014
It’s a quiet and relaxing italian spring evening and I’m sitting on the couch in my studio, listening to this record and thinking about the “rentless pursuit of the tone…”, a pursuit that every guitar player, it doesn’t matter if he plays and electric, an acoustic or a classical guitar has always in his mind and his fingers.
I talk about tone because I think that this work starts from a different idea: the idea to create a different new sound playing the guitar in way different by the usual one. How would a guitar play without her sustain? How would it play if it was used like a sort of Pythagoreans instrument? What if we only consider that sound of the plucked string?
These are all interesting questions that reveal the toughts, the ideas that the composer Agustin Castilla-Avila used in this record. A record very different from the other one, more experimental, maybe less melodic but I think more interesting: all the music is for guitar, for guitar but in different forms and shape, solo, duo, trio, quartet, speaker and guitar, for a total of 15 tracks and passages.
The record shows also the presence of several different interpreters, each one giving a different personal view of Castilla-Avila’s ideas.
Very interesting and hightly recommended!
NeuGuitars 