GUISEPPE IELASI

Gesine

CD, Häpna

Experimental guitar music that hangs lightly in the Italian sky and makes you think of holiday, relaxing on the beach and daydreaming for two weeks. A clear, shining and tranquil vision of sound that would fit the score of a Italo-western movie, except for the dynamics, the evilness and the plot. “Gesine” has no plot, its hovering within its one moment – a special kind of bliss – without future or past, just sound.

With only two CDs Häpna has become one of my favorite record labels for experimental electronic music (these being Pita’s “get off” and especially Sinistri’s “free pulse” – I know that there are more releases on Häpna, but these were the first two that I heard. I guess, I’ll check out the rest come time and ressources) and “gesine” by Italian experimental guitarist and electronic musician (or was that electric guitarist and experimental musician?) Guiseppe Ielasi is no let down either. Starting from a single note almost ghostly reverbing for a short time, he dives deep into the wide open spaces of sound that come from miniscule details or arrangement. Or derangement, whatever you prefer. An easy stretch between the avant-blues guitar drones of Loren Mazzacane Connors to some ambient landscapes and spheres. Ielasi uses his guitar and some percussions, which get electronic treatment but never so much that you wouldn’t recognise them anymore, but rather as a simple formula to strip away layers of cultural ballast to find their more basic sound underneath. Thereby he leaves gaps open for free connotations, for the listener to fall into and either lose or find himself. An interesting concept, that makes up for an interesting half hour at least.

As with all true experimental musicians the interest of Iealsi lies more with sound than with song. Structurally there is a simple bow of evolving, that starts with some sound, like the aforementioned single picked guitar note, a heavily echoing drum-tom or a wavering organ sound that might just be the looped remains of a guitar’s reverb, and builds from there. At times into a basic looped pattern, with the guitar strumming a line of chord-changes, or into a form almost without boundaries in which sounds evaporate into thin air and colour, a vibrating single frequency of harmonic beauty, but refuse to hang to each stronger than clouds of smoke. This ease and aloofness is the most prominent distinctive feature of Ielasis tracks. So much that you can almost smell the sunshine in front of his studio shining down on barren rocks and fields of stone, with the bluest heaven hanging above that you have ever seen. Nowhere is there a dark or sombre undertow, no evil sounds or atmospheres buried in the mix. Everything is drenched in a dozy tranquility that is very much like the feeling of having spent a few hours too many in the direct sunlight and now trying to sleep of the weariness in the darkened hotelroom.

The associative vicinity to Fennesz’ “Venice” is obvious here, but the two records are definitley quite far apart, for instance by their use of real instruments and the complete lack of glitches or other digital percussive elements on “gesine”, but also close to each other in other respects, such as the dominance of sound over form and the fact, that the most important parts of sounds are hidden in those frequencies and harmonies that are not being played. “The rest is silence” is not a defaitist sigh of losing but the almost gnostic realization of an artistic vision. Or plain the secret to interesting sound.

www.hapna.com 

5/2005