Comambient - Tre Storie Per Chitarra

 

Released: November 2

In terms of instrumental complexity, Tre Stories Per Chitarra is a rather stripped down approach featuring only a single acoustic guitar played by the one Riccardo Komesar. But compositionally, this album is incredibly complex, mainly due to the guitar used - a customized nine string guitar built with the standard three low strings and six high strings, effectively doubling the highs of the guitar. This configuration gives the complex fingerpicked patterns a certain quality that I haven’t really heard anywhere else before. The low tomes bellow out with a unitary tone while the highs give off an impression of slightly shattered harmony.  It feels ethereal while remaining grounded at the same time.

Thematically, the album is rather vague but conjures up images and motifs of change, travel, and more transcendent ideas that are difficult to express in plain words. It’s really quite the more appropriate choice to simply allow the gently fingerpicked sequences speak for themselves. With each track being north of the ten minute mark, they frequently span multiple moods and musical themes within each one. But even so, all three manage to maintain a certain wistfulness to them. Perhaps this is just a result of the idiosyncratic nature of Komesar’s fingerpicking style but it is prominent nonetheless. The sequences range from soft and nearly ambient to intense and even seemingly overwrought in emotion. There is, in the final track, a moment in which the intensity of his playing seems to grow slowly in its intensity until it finally hits a breaking point - a point in which everything stops and returns with a somewhat languid quality that persists through the remainder of the track. It is just fascinating to me that Komesar is able to put so much range and depth into a composition with a single instrument, managing to express an entire emotional journey in the unusual tuning of open C.