#helena espvall

[priest-iuput]

.

[narizentupidocartazes]

[2023] 25 de Fevereiro | Ciclo Desordem é Progresso#05 | Guilherme Rodrigues & João Carreiro & Felice Furioso | Helena Espvall | Mantle of Gets | SMOP - Lisboa

Cartaz [Travassos]

[burlveneer-music]

Luis Lopes ABYSS MIRRORS - echoisms - Clean Feed is on a tear, check out this slab of free jazz from Lisbon

From the music recorded in two days at Namouche Studios Lisbon, and reaching the public through this cd, comes a constantly changing sound and atmospheric passages, managed with the tense restraint of someone who listens and understands their place within a great formation and moments of collective ecstasy with no final destination. Movements of elusive harmony that revolve around themselves in line with the haunting lyrics of 'He Loved Him Madly' by Miles, along with a whirlwind of strings that brings that liberation of Alan Silva's ensembles, electronic phrases as meta-rhythmic as landscapes and more detours and certain continuities, in an abysmal game of mirrors. The name is well placed! The troop, the Abyss Mirrors, invoked by guitar player Luís Lopes, as described in his own words draws from inspirational foundations and a search for continuity to music that is born from the ensembles of Sun Ra and advances through the electric periods of Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, to continue with Wadada Leo Smith, and pinching from electroacoustic giants like Stockhausen or Gabriel Prokofiev. A Herculean task but full of intention, built by an ensemble made up of a dozen figures, 4 nationalities: Portuguese, Swedish, Finnish, and Brazilian, all currently based in Lisbon, coming from areas as disparate as intersectional: obviously from jazz but also free improvisation and experimental styles, from electronic to underground techno, contemporary or rock, with a good balance between electric and acoustic. All people recognized and recognizable in a collusion of more or less usual cronies from Lopes various wanderings. creditsreleased March 21, 2023 Luis Lopes electric guitar Flak electric guitar Jari Marjamaki electronics Travassos electronics Felipe Zenícola electric bass Yedo Gibson tenor , alto, soprano sax Bruno Parrinha alto, soprano sax Helena Espvall cello Maria da Rocha violin Ernesto Rodrigues viola All music by Abyss Mirrors under Lopes direction

[dustedmagazine]

Buck Curran — Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity (Improvisations 2017-2022) (Obsolete Recordings)

Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity (Improvisations 2017 - 2022) by Buck Curran

Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity is an outlier in Buck Curran’s catalog, in that it is a collection of improvisational experiments. Even still, there is a tie that binds these tunes to Curran’s overall oeuvre: a focus on resonance. Throughout his career — whether with his ex-partner Shanti as Arborea or on his own — the artist, multi-instrumentalist and luthier explores ways of extending a note’s sonic envelope via extended techniques. This has led Curran, who drinks from the overflowing Takoma School cup and draws influence from blues-influenced folk music, to align himself with the psychedelic folk scene of the northeastern United States. With this song cycle he strays from both orbits, instead carving a path through dissonance and darker hued textures. Curran is searching within his shadowy side, poking at unexplored pockets of his psychic apparatus, revealing an instinctual drive toward the polychromatic.

While Curran commonly employs the guitar in his arsenal, he’s also adept at the piano. He demonstrates his ivory tickling skills on the title track, a brooding modal piece that balances dark and light tones. The alien timbres of the piano suggest implements within the strings of the instrument. Curran propels swarms of buzzing melodies into the air and sears strange glyphs across the visual field. This synaesthesia is common across his body of work. Curran’s particular brand of psychedelia does not require any substances; his music itself opens the mind. 

Curran is a serial collaborator, and some of these pieces find him selecting friends and confederates with whom to jointly experiment. On “Gemini Sun, Gemini Rising,” he enlists the help of cellist Helena Espvall (Espers, Anahita), who was a regular Arborea associate. The pair coax writhing phantasms from their strings, with Curran’s guitar producing intertwined streams of uncanny melody across Espvall’s arco environments. Composer Hiroya Miura lays down a delicate and impressionistic piano passage on “Mugen no Umi no Iro.” Curran fights not to overpower the sprightly tinkling, instead choosing to dissolve into the background so that Miura can shine. Eventually the pair seem to lock horns in a subtle dance of keyboard and guitar. “Slow Air” is a short folk guitar tune accompanied by organ drones from Jodi Pedrali, an Italian musician; Curran currently lives in Bergamo with his wife and kids. 

Some of these songs are centered on lyricism rather than dissonance. “Prelude in D Minor” roots itself in an evocative piano melody before diving down a rabbit hole of guitar drone, while the ultra-short “1894 (Coda)” eschews the guitar altogether, instead focusing on a hypnotic keyboard passage with notes that ring out to infinity. Resonance and sustain are never far from the core of all these pieces. Curran toys with these concepts, turning them over in his mind and creating sonic microcosms. We’re fortunate to imbibe the tasty auditory brew that results. 

Bryon Hayes

[musicmakesyousmart]

David Maranha & Helena Espvall - Sombras Incendiadas

three:four records

2015

[bushdog]

(JACC Records)

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Espers - The Empty Bottle, Chicago, Illinois, August 2004

I recently stumbled across this video of 00s psych-folk collective Espers and now I’m helping you stumble across it, too! Great sounds all around. For more, this WFMU performance from around the same time is very happening, too. I’ve said it before, but an Espers boxed set would be a welcome thing ... 

[lflip]

"Out of the crystal clear and warm cosmic perennial waters comes forth another sparkling jewel from Anahita (Tara Burke (Fursaxa) and Helena Espvall (Espers)).  (three:four records)

[obsoleterecordings]

Today is the re-release via Obsolete Recordings of 'We are All One, In the Sun': a tribute to Robbie Basho feat. Glenn Jones, Meg Baird, Arborea, Steffen Basho-Junghans, Helen Espvall, Cian Nugent, Fern Knight, Rahim Alhaj. The album was produced by Buck Curran and first released by Important Records in 2010. UK imprint altvinyl also released a limited vinyl run. The album made Acoustic Guitar magazine Best albums of 2010, Pitchfork 7.8, Mojo Magazine 4 Stars. Also worth checking out is the in-depth article about Basho 'Voice of the Eagle' that Buck wrote for The Fretboard Journal The article was published in 2012 in issue 24. Avail for streaming @ Spotifyhttps://open.spotify.com/album/1wU5lHkuHpndhOR44x6rH4 @ iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/we-are-all-one-in-sun-tribute/id1041236800

[vulnicura]

🌟 :)

jolene by strawberry switchblade jag vet en dejlig rosa by helena espvall & masaki batoh oh anna by the microphones thank you by swans strangers by portishead the abomination by art in manila akuma no uta by boris atom dance by björk will i see you tonight? (feat. vashti bunyan) by devendra banhart hey girl by norma tanega

[narizentupidocartazes]

[2019] 11 de Janeiro | Expressões Minimalistas, um Concerto Inspirado em Tony Conrad - António Caramelo + David Maranha + Diana Combo + Helena Espvall + Pedro Chau + Tiago Castro | SMUP - Parede

Cartaz [Madalena Matoso]

[mudpuddling-moved]

ok but death letter by helena espvall & masaki batoh

[dustedmagazine]

Various Artists—Ten Years Gone: A Tribute To Jack Rose (Obsolete)

Ten Years Gone: A Tribute to Jack Rose by Various Artists

If you listen closely to solo acoustic guitar music made in this century, whether you know it or not, you owe a debt to Jack Rose. When the 21st century first lurched into motion, he was best known as a member of the Appalachian-drone-noise combo Pelt. But when a felicitously timed job loss coincided with a resolution to develop his fingerstyle guitar chops, Rose emerged from the proverbial woodshed (actually his apartment in Philadelphia) to become an early evangelist for the blues-raga-etc. synthesis that John Fahey, Robbie Basho and a few others first proposed in the 1960s, which came to be known as American Primitive Guitar. Pondering the articulated ambivalence of another guitarist to be so categorized, Rose told fellow standard-bearer Glenn Jones that that was exactly how he wanted to be known. He blazed through a series of developmental stages in fairly short order, investigating mystic free-form, rigorously emulated American folk forms and intensely social rags, playing six- and twelve-string guitars, investing all he played with a distinctively personal heaviness of tone and rhythm, during intense, mostly solitary tours and on a series of splendid LPs before dying drastically young in 2009.

Buck Curran is a guitar player and scholar who, during Rose’s meteoric run, was a member of the Maine-based duo Arborea. Presently a solo performer based in Bergamo, Italy, he undertook the task of assembling a tribute album honoring Rose, something Curran had previously done in tribute of Robbie Basho. The project was originally released by Tompkins Square as a download in December 2019, on the tenth anniversary of Rose’s death. But after a couple years, Curran took it back and augmented it; his own label, Obsolete Recordings, issued a new edition with four additional tracks in June 2022. The participants include people who played with Rose, moved in the same circles that he did, or were moved by his example to ride the vehicle of solo guitar exploration down their own road. Not everyone plays guitar: fiddler Mike Gangloff, of Pelt and the Black Twig Pickers, and cellist Helena Espvall, of Espers, are fellow travelers who use the keen of bowed strings to give vent to the enduring grief over a friend and comrade lost. Micah Blue Smaldone, Nick Schillace and Sir Richard Bishop, all fellow guitarists who shared stages and hospitality opportunities with Rose back in the day, play tunes that express their personal strengths. 

A dozen tracks, including the four new ones, come from Curran and folks who to some degree picked up Rose’s baton. The consistency of the contributions is remarkably high. Newer American guitarists Joseph Allred and Prana Crafter cover the mystical end of the American Primitive spectrum, while Matt Sowell represents the rustic pole; Liam Grant, one of the late arrivals, spikes mystery with velocity. Other contributors show how far Rose’s signal has been broadcast. Simone Romei and Paolo Novellino represent Curran’s current country of residence, the former with some classic Takoma-style blues picking, the latter eschewing genre signifiers in favor of reverie. Argentine Mariano Rodriguez honors Rose with a stirring slide dirge. Welsh picker Gwenifer Raymond is every bit as energetic as Rose could be. Spaniards Isasa and Xisco Rojo both wax reflective, in their personal styles. Czech guitarist Jakub Simansky’s agile bluesiness is probably closer to Curran’s style than Rose’s, but that’s an observation, not a criticism. There’s just one caveat; Jack would have wanted to know where the vinyl was. Reportedly there’s an LP master ready to go, awaiting licensure, but until this compilation is available in a format that can tip a scale and be seen without voltage, the work is not done.

Bill Meyer