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: