Ferran Fages: electric guitar and walkie-talkie
Composed, recorded and mixed by Ferran Fages from May to September 2009
Mastering by Pau Torres
Photography by Pau Torres
Layout by Kostis Kilymis
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It is hard getting away from the dedicatory title of this album. It’s not that it is unusual in itself, simply that a dedication like this usually implies a debt of some sort. On this occasion it is not hard to guess, given that Pau Torres is the person behind etude records, the label that put out quite a few discs Ferran has been involved in in the past years, most notably his two guitar cds ‘Cançons per a un lent retard’ and ‘Al voltant d’ un para/.lel’. So that’s reason enough for a dedication, at least in my book.
It wouldn’t be out of place to compare Pau Torres with the two guitar cds mentioned above. With them Ferran –known up until a few years ago mostly for his turntable and electronics skills- staked out a different territory for himself, one that involved melodic and chromatic explorations that were quite distanced from the textural nature of improvised music at the turn of the century. Now this new album removes itself quite a bit from the dissonant fields of the above works and delivers a thick slice of reverberating guitar explorations. Bracketed by two pieces of innovative feedback constructions, the main part of the record is Ferran at his most evocative, touching upon nocturnal tones and employing longer time structures than his previous work has gotten us used to. As such, Pau Torres is at its most effective at album length, tracing out the outlines of some invisible yet enveloping story and establishing its own and individual touch. And maybe that’s what the title is all about, maybe there is some untold story behind this, or maybe a whole story actually developed out of the two people involved -Pau’s pictures that accompany the album certainly tell their own tale alongside the music- but I’ll wager that in the 42 minutes of this disc, you won’t be needing any stories to be lending meaning to this music.
