Paolo Angeli “Jar’a” (ReR, 2021)

When about three years ago I reviewed a record where Angeli was featured as a guest, I promised myself to write more extensively about him after the release of a proper solo album. The time has come now. “Jar’a” is a beautiful record where Sardinian music, under the appearances of a tenor voice (Omar Bandinu from the vocal ensemble Tenores di Bitti “Mialinu Pira”), is mixed and intertwined with a not-overdubbed-or-overtly-post-produced-post-rock-music.

In its premises, and in its results, the record is a very melancholic product, on one hand since Angeli’s special guitar remembers here the atmospheres of Christian Fennesz or of Sigur Ros, throughout the echoing of the saturated noise, on the other because both Sardinian folklore and post rock are now, in 2021, leftovers of an assimilation to the maistream or, to put it as Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu in his movie “Birdman” states, of a ‘cultural genocide’.

But, let’s go back to the roots. Paolo Angeli is born in 1970, and he started to play guitar at 9: his father was his first teacher. In 1990 when the University of Bologna was occupied, there the Laboratorio di Musica e Immagine was born: 14 musicians, including Angeli, were unhinging the boundaries between composition and improvisation, and between the music genres. Those who depict occupations as an occasion to sleep and smoke joints don’t know what they’re talking about, evidently.

Three years after these events, Angeli was back in his isle, where he asked Mr Giovanni Scanu to teach him the secrets of folk music and folk guitar. Contemporarily Angeli attended the singers of the sacred week (Easter) coming from different parts of his beloved Sardinia. This is the period, during until 1996, where Angeli worked on his ‘sardinian prepared guitar’, an incredible instrument mixing together Sardinian roots and the avant garde music, with its 18 strings and its being a hybrid between a baritone guitar, a cello and a drumset.

These are the years where Angeli set his poetics and start collaborating with imporant and very creative pals at the same time. He will issue records in company of his Sardinian colleagues Gavino Murgia on tenor saxophone and Antonello Salis on accordion and prepared piano, but also with international known improvisers such as Evan Parker, Hamid Drake, Mats Gustaffson and Ned Rothemberg.

In 2005 he left Sardinia from Barcellona, where he developed a new style of music: these are the years of his collaboration with Fred Frith’s label ReR, culminating in the album “Tessuti” where he played compositions of Frith himself and Bjork, the famous ‘alternative pop’ singer. From 2010 to 2013 after attending a concert by Paco de Lucia, Angeli fell in love and studied flamenco guitar, obtaining in the end a mix of different traditions: flamenco, Balkan and Arab suggestions, music from the North Africa.

From 2015 to 2016 he toured extensively Brasil, Australia, Japan, Turkey, and Europe. After all these experiences, and after mixing avant garde, traditional music and indie rock – there’s another intresting tribute album after “Tessuti” called “22.22” where Angeli plays the music of Radiohead – our hero is ready to put together all these different experiences. The resulting record is this “Jar’a” we’re reviewing here.

An album thought in six movements, it starts with the sound of a guitar arpeggio similar to the one of an African kalimba – as a matter of suggestion. Then, on the second movement, guitar feedbacks and saturated sounds leave soon space to little arpeggios fluorishing around arco’s melodies. Then the music widens through new sound patterns. An electrified melody becomes more dissonant, then again the arco and the echoes, while electric and acoustic melodies alternate to arpeggios and melodies.

The third movement sees an electrified arpeggio with little rhythmical accents, then the fourth movement starts with a guttural voice becoming more melodic and the hyper saturated sounds of guitar somewhere in between Sigur Ros and Fennesz as mentioned previously. A trembling effect almost breaks the surface of sound mixing then with it. The voice is amplified through delays and guitars effects.

The fifth movement is full of echoes of the music of the Slint, the historical post-rock band from the 1990s, then you can hear an almost ‘music concrète’ through the reverbs. And finally the sixth movement comes, created around another guitar arpeggio accompanied by a sound pattern and the voice, culminating in what can makes you think of the sound of an undertow.

What you’ll hear through this album is a music made of different elements that are fitting together very well. There’s no nostalgia in there, nor the atmosphere of a frigid experiment I have heard through some other records in these last years. This mix of ancient and contemporary musics is something you feel as natural and fluid as something cultivated for years, and we all need to be so grateful to Paolo Angeli for his desire to create new music and take on the right tracks his inspiration.