Review of Aerial Boundaries by Michael Hedges, Windham Hill Records, 1984
Sometime it’is almost amazing. You can dig in your discoteque and meet cds and records that you had given for “dated”, “defined” for a lot of time, you look at them with some nostalgia, they are often music that you have joined to a particular moment of your life, the youth, a memorable evening, a fantastic concert, a fortunate meeting. And then you decide that maybe you can listen to them once again, or better to compare them with the sonorous imprint that they have left in your memory, and you always do it with some fear, the fear to discover that you don’t like them as before, that the time has washed away that powder of amazement with which you had listened to them the first time, that the music are not aged well … in short what happen when you go to a dinner of ex classmates and you discover that they are all fattened up and neglected and that the the most beautiful girl of the class has simply become pathetic.
Michael Hedges, luckly, doesn’t have these kind of problems . Rather, to think that they have been being spent 20 years for that night of 2nd of December 1997 when he died in a crash car, 43 years old … infamous destiny for one of the most interesting innovators of the guitar of the 80’s, a man able reinvent the dictionary of the acoustic guitar. I have never loved the label of “new age” that they had stuck him: Hedges was a great guitarist, a revolutionary that had brought a healthy wind on an instrument that continued to sleep among the lost glories of the folk and the blues. And this record …. already the title is a masterpiece …. “Aerial Boundaries” … but which confinements? Those done draw by the clouds that they appear in the beautiful front cover? Hedges drew to full hands from completely different repertoires among them, from the blues, from the classical one, from the rock, from the contemporary, from the reggae he knew how to unite them, to sew them together getting some new sonorities helped by the prodigious and innovative technique with which it played his acoustic strings. Anything else other than new age, anything else other than a cheap Aquarium Era, anything else other than dreamy crystals. Aerial Boundaries is a pleasant and a genial record and has a great success crowning Michael as one of the greatest guitarists in every time. Who knows where his guitar would have brought him? We will never know .. but it’s so nice to listen to again his talent and his cleverness in cds like this one, thirty years they are almost passed from when the Windham Hill stared to sell it and it had the possibilità to to grow old very well always maintaining intact its charm and the shine of the metal strings of the guitar of his genial, marvelous, unlucky author.
NeuGuitars 