Music Reviews

image not
available
anymore
Artist: Gianni Mimmo, Xabier Iriondo (@)
Title: Your Very Eyes
Format: CD
Label: Wallace (@)
Rated: *****
Presented as a a journey with an overt sacred/religious approach "Your very eyes", as you can guess, here and there won’t betray your "transcendental music" expectations and will creepy inside your agnostic little hearts, but on the other side I also think "religious" would be misleading definition cause the global work in my opinion goes really well with "documentaristic". I think the strong personality of Gianni Mimmo has had an heavy weight in the sound characterization of the duo, that’s why even if they’re considerably far one from the other I believe there’s a continuum between the Kursk sonorization this saxophonist did with Contini and this work with experimentalist Iriondo, at last it would be a logical step considering Iriondo at the time of the sonorization had been directly involved in the work as a sound engineer. You don’t have to consider it as the extension of a solo work, it just shows a light and well pondered intervention of the Italo-basque guitarist here mainly involved with singular chord instrument and as sound engineer, his incursions most of the times are non intrusive, but somewhere else he’s able to pierce the audio space firmly. Thought they’ve been recording in an old church and the sound is really influenced by the audio refraction caused by that particular kind of stone with which the church has been built, don’t think of it has that horrible "hangar like" feel, the sound ambience is clearly defined and you can distinguish easily everything without drowning in reverb. In some episodes the atmosphere gets really intense, somewhere else the musicians "resigned" to something really melodic and I’m sure it will have a great appeal for a "jazz/classic" crowd of listeners since without falling into cheap solutions it brings some traditional music in the backpack and it’s damn easily digestible, which is never to be taken for granted from a recording like that. Sorry for being boring but more than filmic I’d put the emphasis on "documentaristic music", you know it’s different for in documentaries most of the times the soundtrack has more of a continuum and is more central for the story plot, it reminded me so much of those old documentaries based on road trips on the life in some deserted, ancient areas, "music for discovery channel" or in the likes? Maybe and that’s ok for me.


Chain D.L.K. design by Marc Urselli
Suffusion WordPress theme by Sayontan Sinha