Luís Lopes: Solo and Duo

By Eyal Hareuveni

 Luís Lopes - Dark Narcissus: Stereo Guitar Solo (Rotten/Fresh / Shhpuma, 2024)

Portuguese guitarist Luís Lopes describes his idiosyncratic, solo aesthetics as averse to any linearity. He refuses to subscribe to any genre, pushing himself to experiment with paradoxes, and preferring the electric guitar sounds as they are, dirty, crispy, excessive, disoriented, violent and obliterating of the senses. Dark Narcissus is the fourth solo album of Lopes and was recorded at Estúdio do Olival in Alfarim in October 2023. It takes the expressive and noisy music to surprising restrained terrains.

Lopes plays a stereo guitar connected to two separate channels/amps, and all the music was captured in real-time, with no overdubs. The opening, 20-minute “The Cry of Dark Narcissus” is an introspective and sparse piece that offers enough time and space to linger on every resonant note of the stereo guitar, patiently weaved into a surreal, thorny texture. The following “I Ascend So I Could Look At You” is a more abstract but unsettling piece, and surprisingly, even a vulnerable and melancholic one. The last piece, “Reminiscence of A Dark Night” takes an impossible task, sketching a meditative texture through a noisy trance, and most likely only Lopes can make perfect sense of such a demanding mission.

Schneider | Lopes (Schnieder Collaborations, 2024) 

The duo of Lopes with German drummer Jörg A. Schneider was recorded at Schneider’s home base, at the Loundry Room in Hückelhoven in May 2023. The album features two free improvised pieces. The first “One Armed Bandit” suggests an uncompromising, fast and furious, rhythmic interplay between two powerful and stubborn musicians, but without settling on any patterns. In the second piece “Danger Of Suffocation” Lopes takes the leading role and keeps expanding the manic patterns of Schneider with pulse-free, open-ended yet coherent, noisy and distorted ideas.