Minimalism in the realms of experimental and ambient music, Giuseppe Ielasi’s ideas on #Neuguitars #blog #GiuseppeIelasi # 12K
Musician and composer, Giuseppe Ielasi worked from 1996 to 2006 in the field of improvised music, collaborating with musicians such as Jerome Noetinger, Martin Siewert, Brandon Labelle, Nmperign, Phill Niblock, Oren Ambarchi, Mark Wastell, Nikos Veliotis. Since 2007 he has mainly dealt with electroacoustic music composition often performed and reworked in concert, during various tours in Europe, the United States and Japan and participation in numerous international festivals. In 2010 he presented his works at the Center Pompidou in Paris and at INA-Grm (Radio France). He has been collaborating with Armin Linke since 2005, as a musician in audiovisual performances (ZKM Karlsruhe, RomaEuropa Festival, Goethe Institut New York, Villa Romana Firenze), and as an editor and composer for video and film productions (the medium-length film Alpi was presented at the Film Festival of Berlin 2011). From 1998 to 2005 he edited the record label Fringes Recordings, making productions by Eliane Radigue, Alvin Curran, Rolf Julius, Charlemagne Palestine, Brandon Labelle, Eric La Casa and many others. He is currently co-curator of two labels: Schoolmap Records (with Francesco Tenaglia, with whom he has produced works by David Toop, Eliane Radigue, Akira Rabelais, Tom Recchion and others) and Senufo Editions (with Jennifer Veillerobe). To these activities is added a long experience in the field of audio post-production (mixing, mastering) for cinema, video and record labels such as Alga Marghen, Die-Schachtel, 12k, Preservation and many others. Ileasi started playing the guitar in 1988, and has worked for many years in the ‘improvised music’ industry. Since 2007 he has mainly focused on studio work, working on compositions for CD and records, theater and film. Subsequently he abandoned the guitar and his performances are now based on multi-channel diffusion and recomposition of pre-existing pieces and fragments, to create complex site-specific sound works.
For a couple of years, however, he has returned to guitar, first in 2020 with the album “Five Wooden Frames”, then in 2022 with “The Prospect”, all released by the independent New York label 12K. Two seminal works, in which the attention seems to be placed between the fractures generated between time and space. A first listening to the music of Ielasi immediately warns us that we are faced with a musician who has something to say, with a personality that immediately appears so decisive and evident that our speech cannot be diversified either of a laudatory tone or a superfluous search for sources to rely on.
Ielasi’s music is a lively and opaque game of minimal sound spots, a gait of solitary and repetitive signs, a distracted harmony, a dense conciseness of gestures. Strongly thought out, studied and organized music in which the genre or elegy scene becomes mime and drama, in the plasticity desired by the expression, in which white, light become volume. A mature and self-confident musical handwriting, capable of expressing a moving poetic that fits perfectly with the images shown on the covers of the two CDs: photographs of empty tennis courts, perhaps abandoned. These two albums go straight to the point, nothing marginal, unnecessary, baroque has been left, they are the result of an elaborate intrigue of very stringent musical lines that seem to define and sculpt the space, cutting into a new, complex, complete and imaginative crowd of forms. A moral world emerges, where sound, form and space become volume alien to any conceptual coldness and aridity. A mature musical sign.
Of one thing I’m sure: Giuseppe Ielasi likes empty tennis court spaces.
NeuGuitars 