Search - Alfredo Lagos, Massimo Mariani, Giovanni Venosta :: Metamorphoses: Electronic Adventures In Flamenco

What starts off as a lovely, intimate flamenco guitar improvisation in the hands of Alfredo Lagos becomes grist for the sonic manipulations and digital deconstructions of Giovanni Venosta. A famed sonic plunderer who regularly runs disparate musical ingredients together into collages of bracing intensity, Venosta stays his course here, getting assistance from Massimo Mariani and Marco Vecchi. His treatments of Lagos range from a study of the flamenco rhythms that uses a reversed and clipped version of Lagos's improvisation to speedily recreate how the piece moves. It sounds at once like a set of stunted breakbeats and an aural abstraction of momentous proportions. And then Venosta takes on the timbre of the guitar, toying mightily with it, yanking chimes and echoes and organ tones from it. At times the treatments are oceanic, building and bursting without ceasing. But then they recede to quietude and tenderness, even if what's tender gets phase-shifted into a musical dizzy spell. This is Venosta and company at their best, making a sonic spool that's hard to fully grasp but easy to fully embrace. --Andrew Bartlett