The trend in avant garde, improvised music these days is often guided by a sense of a "busting apart," of pieces being flung outward from a dissolved or imperceptible center, of small shards of ideas with no home or center to come back to; like thoughts without the mind to think them, like a mind without a body: an overall, disconnected impression. This is not the case with Gustavo Aguilar. As conveyed by his title, "Unsettled On an Old Sense of Place," while these shards of sound explore daring and limitless territory, there is an overwhelming yearning in these gestures for their center. While that center is felt to varying degrees, the paths that these shards travel to the core, like faint trails of smoke, are not tangible, but are perceptible. Without being horizontal enough to touch on the "soundscape" description, Aguilar's sense of musical development is not lost on one who is listening for form and who is hoping to be taken some place, rather than simply bombarded with random noise munchies. Despite the lack of meter or a bar line. Inspired by experiences from his childhood, these pieces are experienced like moving collages, not unlike a kaleidoscope of definitive, vivid fragments, playfully intertwining, rising, falling and transforming.

Private Note: I love your "GUSTAVO AGUILAR: Unsettled On An Old Sense Of Place" CD so much I'm going to feature it on the FRONT PAGE of CD Baby for a few days. We're REALLY picky about what goes on the front page. We get about 150 new albums a DAY coming in here now, (about 150,000 total), and yours is one of the best I've ever heard.