The Art of Fingerstyle Guitar (And More) in 2019

As promised, after a year or so we find ourselves here talking about guitar, albeit with some differences compared to the last time. If in the previous article we dealt exclusively with fingerpicking guitar, this year we’ll try to widen a little bit the look of our analysis, speaking in general of those artists who put the guitar at the center of their music, whether acoustic or electric, played with the pick or rather with their fingers. In particular, we want to talk about those discs that, avoiding virtuosity for themselves, put the “voice” of this instrument at the center of their research, capturing – with a sense of measure – its infinite expressive capacities.

In any case we can only start from fingerpicking guitar and especially from what, in my opinion, is one of the most beautiful records released in this field in recent years.
The record is called “Insilio” and its author, Conrado Isasa, comes from Spain. And the origin is not a merely geographical factor: the artist from Madrid in fact manages to create a music that, while starting from the technical, stylistic and cultural heritage of Anglo-Saxon fingerpicking, has a soul strongly linked to its roots. For example, we look to the master John Fahey, an evident influence in the music of the Spaniard, Isasa manages to grasp his spirit more than the practical result: he appropriates that spatiality between the notes that characterized the patron saint of fingerpicking, but in order to evoke inner spaces rather than physical and temporal spaces typical of the musician of Takoma Park.  The ancestrality and the infinite American expanses in “Insilio” give way, therefore, to a delicate intimism. The songs of the album present mainly a slow and melancholic pace, led by scattered arpeggios and melodies often with a Latin flavor. The guitar, in some cases, exploits more the dynamics of classical music (and therefore of the Spanish heritage) than the typical folk ones (see the crescendos often different from the typical American ragtime).
The rarefied melodies of “Carrasco, Montevideo” and “Pocitos, Montevideo”, for example, vividly express nostalgia for his family lands (Isasa is of Uruguayan origin) to culminate in elegant and austere arpeggios that exude authentic emotion. The short watercolour of “Conversaciones en un supermercado”, despite the prosaic title, suggests a conversation veiled with sadness about the problems of everyday life. “San Antonio de la Florida” combines the intimism and sacredness of traditions with a progression, for once majestic, that evokes the grandeur of the paintings by Goya kept by the hermitage of the title. Finally, Isasa does not renounce to pay homage directly to his great master with the elegiac “Copia para John Fahey”, and indirectly, with the lively “Arquitecto Tenista” with its obvious American flavour. In a few words, “Insilio” is a special album filled with delicacy and which, in its apparent shyness, avoids the danger of emulation.

Let’s fly fast then on the other discs at the fingertips of 2020.
Alex Archibald comes from Canada and with his “Cat’s cat tongue” he proposes a classically American sound that although it doesn’t shine for originality still manages to sound fresh. In particular, it strikes the metallic and rough sound that gives a decidedly rustic look to his guitar approach, which uses resonances that give a lively density to his rag and raga-folk. Exemplary in this sense are the opening track “Eastern Alleys After hours” and the long faheyana “Rupert and the empress”. Archibald also decided to expand his usual sound, introducing banjo and violin in some tracks, thus adding an almost Appalachian flavor to the record as “Safe Room in a store” shows. 

J.R. Bohannon, who? I confess that until recently I did not know the American guitarist, author of the excellent “Dusk”. And until then I had missed a valuable guitarist, capable of alternating dragging songs with (“Reflections of An AMerican Dream”) or without slide (“Paradise Kentucky”), to impalpable and mysterious songs like “For Jina”. Remarkable also the hypnotic “A continuous Harmony”, whose arpeggio insisted on the 12 strings reminds a more melodic James Blackshaw, and the atmospheric title track. In short, just a brief hint for a record that would deserve more space but, if we consider Bohannon the fingerpicking revelation of the year, we’re sure we’ll have more opportunities to talk about him.

Finally, we want to quickly report two compilations not to be missed for lovers of fingerpicking, both published by Tompkins Square, a label to which fans of the genre will never stop being grateful: the first, the ninth volume of the well-deserved series “Imaginational Anthems”, edited by Ryley Walker, is a surprising and tasty collection of names unknown to most people, for an in-depth analysis of which we refer you to the excellent article by our friend Luca Salmini clicking here (only italian).

The second publication is “Ten Years Gone (A Tribute to Jack Rose)”, edited by our old acquaintance Buck Curran, which collects unpublished music inspired and dedicated to the giant Jack Rose 10 years after his death. This is a wonderful compilation that brings together many of the best exponents of the genre, among which in a patriotic impetus we want to remember our Simone Romei, whose “Hawksbill Mountain Blues”, according to an English reviewer, has the bravado of the first John Fahey and Paolo Laboule Novellino, with the dilated guitar meditation of “Spiriti e scheletri”.

However, it’s time to plug the jack to the amplifier and hold the pick. And we do it talking about an artist maybe not so celebrated, but who can be considered one of the greatest “guitar heroes” of today’s scene: we’re talking about Chris Forsyth, a veteran who has played practically every kind of music, but who in recent years with the Solar Motel Band has dedicated himself to a mainly instrumental guitar rock, which has consecrated him as one of the best soloists of this scene. What makes him at the same time brilliant, but different from the classic guitar hero is the essentiality of his sound and his phrasing, able to create on one hand the excitement that an electric guitar solo can (or must) create (let’s call it air guitar effect), on the other hand avoiding sterile and useless virtuosity, in favor of a perfect balance between technique, heart and effectiveness.
With “All time Present”, Forsyth (this time without the Solar Motel Band and after the uncertain parenthesis of “Dreaming in the non-dream”), returns to the double format that seems to be more congenial to him, giving him the necessary space for his guitar to relax and explore different sound territories. It starts with “Tomorrow might as well be today” and you’re immediately overwhelmed by a lightning “television” riff around which a fascinating and melodic instrumental rock song with a sprinkling of mellotron develops. “Mystic Mountain” is instead a sung, syncopated and dilated track, structured around a rocky and contagious riff, while “Dream song”, enriched by the voice of Rosali Middleman, is a psychotic vortex of notes that dissolves into a lysergic interlude. And it is psychedelia, in its various forms, that is the master in the rest of the album: the ecstatic and Californian flavor of “The past ain’t passed” and the minimalist, martial and hypnotic “New paranoid cat”, until you get to the two most atypical songs: the cosmic trip “(livin’) on cubist time” that brings us back directly to the kraut Germany and in particular to the inventions for electric guitar by Manuel Gottsching and, finally, the tour de force of the album, that is the 20 minutes of “Techno Pop”. Funky robotic and minimalist on which Forsyth patiently stretches his solo, privileging a hypnotic progression to the expected explosion that never comes.  The long track ends with an excellent record that tells us once again that the legacy of electric guitar giants like Tom Verlaine and Richard Thompson is definitely in good hands.

Bill MacKay is another artist who has been around for a long time and – with the various bands he has played in or through duets with other artists (e.g. Ryley Walker) – he has played and mixed rock, folk, jazz and avant. Only a few years ago, however, he started a real solo career. In 2019 with “Fountain Fire” he continued in an excellent way the discourse he started with the remarkable “Esker”. The field of expression that MacKay has chosen for his solo adventure is what someone has effectively defined as “American cinematic”; that is, a quintessentially American style that is strongly figurative, where the expressiveness of the instruments evokes the boundless spaces typical of the cinematic imagination and indelibly linked in the collective memory to the USA. I have spoken of style and not of genre because we can refer to it as an attitude that is independent of the field in which it operates. It is in the journey, in the dilation, in the space between the sounds that this style finds its identity, so much so that we can include in it guitarists of different ages and backgrounds such as Ry Cooder, Bill Frisell, even John Fahey and to quote a recent artist we talked about last year Marisa Anderson.
Bill MacKay doesn’t directly recall any of them, but he certainly carries on that attitude.
The album, played entirely by MacKay, starts with the amazing “Pre-California”, a track built on guitar overdubs around a bass guitar lap. The guitar plays on the distortions and swirls of the slide with a stopped sound that brings back both the surf and the African desert blues (to which the American desert sound is certainly linked as, for example, Ry Cooder taught us with his association with Ali Farka Tourè).
These guitar sounds are protagonists in several tracks such as in the oblique and Frisellian “The Movie house”, enriched by organ and sound effects, in the almost western “Welcome”, in “Arcadia”, where McKay plays like the Ry Cooder of Paris Texas in acid and, finally, in the visionary “Dragon Country” that evokes hallucinations of wandering in the desert. The alienating and dissonant folk of “Man & His Panic” closes the series of instrumental pieces, but not the record, which continues instead with sung songs that boast an absolutely effective writing. As it happens in a “Birds Of May”, which recalls the songwriting vein of the best Steve Gunn or in a “Try It On”, which unexpectedly mixes English folk atmospheres, to crystal clear and electric phrasing of folk-rock matrix.

Sarah Louise is an American artist trained in fingerpicking, but in her short career she has already shown remarkable curiosity and great capacity for evolution.
After a guitar-only record and another one sung and close to folk songwriting, Louise is back with a highly experimental record, titled “Nightime birds and morning stars” and based on the layering of electric guitar sounds and digital manipulations of them.
The result is a rather difficult record to “grasp”. It’s not a defect, on the contrary; the record bases its qualities just on this difficult handling and multiformity, because it forces the listener to look for always different perspectives necessary to frame the album in the right way, giving rise to always different and stimulating listening.
Yes, because probably the right angle to penetrate the record is to have no perspective at all. As far as I’m concerned, in fact, I started to really appreciate the record the moment I stopped trying to understand it and I decided instead to abandon myself to what seemed to me to be a naturalistic psychedelia. In other words, a new declination of the psychedelic sound that, instead of inviting to the dreamlike journey and escape, preaches a greater communion with reality, obtained by tuning one’s self to the dimension and rhythm of the nature that surrounds us.  It is useless to try to describe the songs that make up the album, it is enough to know that throughout the program we search for the essence of the guitar sound and its link with the musician: even if transfigured, speeded up or made unrecognizable, the guitar never loses its identity and becomes the bearer of humanity and the sense of wonder of those who play it.

If until now we have talked about records that make stylistic coherence and internal homogeneity their main characteristics, let’s finish our gallery with “Volume Quattro” by Paolo Spaccamonti, a record that seems to make variety its most evident peculiarity.
Yet, despite a variety of registers and styles adopted, it is a work that precisely finds its unity in its focus on the sound and expressiveness of the guitar. Like the voice of an individual is always the same but, depending on the context, through nuances it expresses different moods and emotions. But what is the voice of Paolo Spaccamonti or better of his guitar? It is a soft and calm voice, clear and strong. Through the notes of the instrument, scattered, dilated and lying in the vaporous space created by a wise use of effects, the Turin guitarist enhances the clarity of his guitar style. He is perfectly immersed in different genres without bending to diversity; he maintains his own identity, interpreting the genre rather than adapting himself. To make a comparison with another art form, he recalls the anecdote between Sir Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman: the one in which the American actor ran and sweated to “transform himself” and change himself into a marathon runner, while impassively the English baronet told him that he could have avoided all that effort by simply  acting…
The voice of Spaccamonti’s guitar can express anxiety in “Ablazioni” (a song that with its rhythmic electronics brings to mind a darker version of his fellow citizens Gatto Ciliegia), dreamlike ecstasy in the delicate miniature of “Nina”, anger in “Nessun codardo tranne voi”, wonder in the contemplative environment of “Un gelido inverno”, but always remains recognizable.
We just have to listen to this voice vibrating through the new wave pulsations of “Paul Dance” and the doom of “Fumo negli occhi”, in the dark ambient of “Tutto è bene quel che finisce” or in the slow motion blues that slowly disappears in a whirlpool of noise of “Diagonal”.
In order to continue the cinematic comparison (which also fits the descriptive and evocative qualities of the music) a good actor without an adequate screenplay is of little use. This is not the case of “Volume four” where, not only the songs are written to measure for the interpretative skills of the main instrument (and for most of the record the only true protagonist), but they shine their own light, thanks to a very solid writing. As for example in the song titled “Luce”, perhaps the masterpiece of the record: a composition with a nocturnal atmosphere that proceeds with minimal waste. Listening to it is like looking at a starry sky where in the beginning you feel lost because everything seems uniform and without references, but then, as when the song opens in a melodic gash hinted at and deliberately unresolved, the look gets lost and finding the orientation seems to have no more importance.