By Nick Ostrum
Gabriel Vicéns Puerto Rican/New York guitarist and composer who has been at it for over a decade, now. His most recent release Muralwhere other musicians are left to interpret his compositions. Pieces range from piano-string duos – the slow and dramatic La Esfera and the primally flirtations Carnal – to a sextet - the mysterious and slinking El Mattoral.
Muralis a sharp pivot from Vicéns’ earlier releases, which more firmly embrace contemporary jazz idioms. Here, Vicéns largely abandons those swinging melodic and rhythmic drivers and embraces contemporary composition in its “new music” sense. One hears influences and inspiration from across that spectrum: the stilted rhythm (sans percussion) of the Third Vienna School, the fixation on note decay of wandelweiser, the suspended accumulation of the Feldman school, but almost always with a drift toward melodics and dynamics. Some of this comes through other inspirations. In Ficcion, Hindemith and early Stravinsky are more evident than minimalism, and that piece is fittingly sprightly and punctuated. Others veer toward neo-romanticism a la Leo Ornstein. Suenos Ligados is another stand-out, a dramatic piece, that fluctuates from a simple and brittle four-note piano line to forceful expulsions from the full ensemble. It is laden with drama, but also tenderness. The titular Mural, which also opens the album, moreover, is a spacious piece, beginning with lone tones that roll and accumulate into something light and abstract, but also bucolic. It is a beautiful gesture toward the spalled and shorn, but polished, impressionistic soundworlds to come.
Mural, in other words, is hard to place, and for that all the better. The 20 th century influences are there, and widely strewn, but also effectively deployed. There is some underlying logic that unites the different inputs that might lie as much in Vicéns’ insistent vision and refusal to box himself in as much as whatever musical theory underlies it. The music here manages to bridge the adventurous and the traditionally (in the tradition of Schoeneberg and those mentioned above) beautiful music. And for that, it deserves a much wider listenership.
Muralis available as a download and CD from Bandcamp:
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