Luca Perciballi’s non-idiomatic guitar on #neuguitars #blog
Luca Perciballi – Guitarist- Composer- Sound artist
Music | Luca Perciballi (bandcamp.com)
An archive is not such if it does not manifest an order and a certain discipline. This requires tedious but necessary work: nothing is more dangerous than an archive in which disorder reigns and in which you cannot find what you are looking for. Tidying up also involves some surprises, which pushes you to listen to new ones and to review some opinions, which in the meantime had oxidized due to a fragmentary and discontinuous vision. For example, if you find five albums by the same artist, received and bought in the last five years, it is good to stop and give them a new, more attentive listen. It is the case of the Italian guitarist Luca Perciballi ( Luca Perciballi – Guitarist- Composer- Sound artist ), the fact of finding five albums in my discoteque: “How to kill complex numbers” of 2016, which I had reviewed some time ago in the blog and which had strongly impressed me;
“Fragile – Birth of a Square”, again made in 2016, a DVD made with Mattia Scappini (live painting);
“The Black Box Theory”, 2018, produced by Setola di Maiale and created with Ivan Valentini (alto and soprano sax, objects and live electronics);
“Fumàna”, cd created in 2020, again for Setola di Maiale, with the Trio Eskimo (Alberto Bertoni, poetry, Enrico Trebbi, poetry and the rediscovered Ivan Valentini, sax);
Just recently a new album has been added created with a new organic, Luca Perciballi Organic Gestures (with Andrea Grossi, double bass, and Andrea Grillini, drums and percussion), entitled “Approximately Grids With A Plan”, produced by the Berlin label Aut Records.
All very interesting albums, with a marked experimental vein. Perciballi, in fact, intelligently defines himself: “Guitarist, composer and sound designer from Italy”. One of his primary characteristics, in fact, is to play his instrument, a Fender Telecaster, in an absolutely non-idiomatic way. When I talk about non-idiomatic guitar, I explicitly refer to Derek Bailey’s ideas regarding various forms of improvisation. By non-idiomatic guitar I don’t just mean an aesthetic practice, but also a kind of ethical, and perhaps political exercise, a different way of playing for the player and the listener. A transformation of the world and of ourselves, aimed at creating something different from a reshuffling of genres in a post-modern key. It is a musical, aesthetic exercise that creates a new acoustic, acousmatic universe, the creation of which represents a new vision of the aesthetic, ethical and musical organization of the guitar. Perciballi’s music expresses a curiosity that allows us to detach ourselves from ourselves, it expresses the shock of not knowing one’s path, of being lost, it expresses the attempt to know if one can think and see in a different way. Playing in this way is, in fact, an exercise in thinking.
Luca Perciballi is a refined and mature improviser, with a clear vision of what he wants to carry out, but his music seems to me to go beyond improvisation: it is his way of conceiving of interpreting the guitar that fascinates me. I said that on his website Luca Perciballi defines himself as guitarist, composer and sound designer, it is a very intelligent and very real definition: his way of playing seems to me an attempt to bring back improvisation, composition, every dimension of the sound of the guitar. in a more concentrated state and, at the same time, less limited and constrained. Perciballi seems to seize every opportunity, both in the traditional sense and in the innovative sense, to seek, to find an open and never definitive modification of what is already known. His music is constantly changing and perfecting, it is never fixed and it is too elusive for precise analysis and description. I find it distressing what seems to be the usual practice of writings on academic music, which treat contemporary, experimental music as a sort of special, practically segregated musical activity. I refuse to see an experimental musician as a specialist in new music, as if music to be normal and unspecialized must be configured as a sort of sonic archeology. I am sincerely grateful to him for his mental and musical openness, it is impossible to get bored with Luca Perciballi.
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