unsettled on an old sense of place

Gustavo Aguilar is a brilliant percussionist who grew up in Brownsville, where Texas meets Mexico. He now lives in New York, runs an ensemble call soNu and has located himself in music at a point where composition and improvisation geed into one another in extraordinary ways. Getting there, he has collaborated closely with defiantly heterodox musicians including Iancu Dumitrescu, Annea Lockwood, Anthony Braxton, and Wadada Leo Smith. Unsettled on an old Sense of Place features six of his own pieces, and it's a fabulously vivid experience. Xochicalco, dedicated to Mexican composer Julio Estrada, might be the soundtrack to a fever dream, its hallucinatory electroacoustics conjured up spontaneously by soNu, plus harpist Anne LeBaron and viola player Mary Oliver, in response to Aguilar's verbal cues and after preparatory listening to selections of Mexican music. Contrafactum For Scelsi is Aguilar solo, playing eclectic guitar as hand percussion - popping harmonics and pummeled clusters, his memory of Mexican serenades conflated with awareness of Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi's guitar piece Ko-Tha. RoKaMaYoHa is a stunning dramatic imagining of Japanese kabuki theatre, centered in kabuki's recurrent theme of revelation through sudden, unexpected noise. It's shrill and strange, with Nina Eidsheim's penetrating voice embedded in processed whistles and woodwinds.

Dirac's Theory is an intimate dialogue with snare drum: the percussion and percussionist drawing out all kids of unexpected nuance between themselves. With Suprachiasmatic Nuclei, Aguilar's declared intention is to address our neurological pacemakers; in practice this means 15 minutes of steady descent from well-defined articulation into ragged yet compulsive white noise. Wendall's History concludes the program, setting text by poet Wendell Barry against a glistening glockenspiel backdrop. Gustavo Aguilar is himself a defiantly unorthodox musician -- the kind we need -- and this is a wonderful CD.
     - Julian Cowley, The Wire

I recall Gustavo Aguilar from a few discs he made on the Acoustic Levitation label, as well as his collaboration with electronic composer Iancu Dumitrescu. The liner notes give us an idea about Gustavo Aguilar and what he is about, although some mystery remains. He grew up in Brownsville, Texas near the Gulf of Mexico and has lived in San Diego, where some of this was recorded. Gustavo plays percussion, electronics, flute, dulcimer and electric guitar. He is joined on the first piece by Phil Curtis (live processing), Nina Eidsheim (voice), Anne LeBaron (prepared harp) and Mary Oliver (viola from ICP). The first piece, "Xochicalco" features some swirling voices, harp, viola, flute and electronics and it is quietly mesmerizing. "Contrafactum for Scelsi" is performed on solo electric guitar and it is a most successful display of minimal beauty done by just tapping on the guitar with the harmonics ringing magically. Gustavo never seems to play any instrument in a traditional way, thus making sounds which are consistently fascinating and surprising. He plays plucked dulcimer on "RoCaMaYoHa" and twists the notes into some strange shapes and also inspires Nina Eidsheim to sing bizarre sounds as well as Alan Lechusza to bent some odd notes on his sax, while Phil Curtis processes and warps their sounds even further out there. Even when Gustavo plays solo snare drum on "Dirac's Theory", he gets a variety of odd sounds out of the snare, similar to the way Sean Meehan does, just more sped up. The longest piece is perhaps the most engaging and strangely mesmerizing. It is called "Suprachiasmatic Nuclei" and the alien voice and sounds float ominously in a slow-moving whirlpool. What I really like about this disc is that much of it is not about music or at least a "melodic" formula. It is engaging and provocative throughout.
     - Bruce Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery

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.
     - From CD Baby

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.
     - CDBaby Review