Duenas,Mario - Beliefs - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Vinyl LP pressing. Scene reports. Regional styles. It all seems charmingly antiquated these days, given how social networking cross-pollination has transcended space and time. But with a hyper-literate, tightly wound, and irreverent brand of post-collegiate rock, Bent Shapes may just be the most quintessentially Boston band of the last few years. Since forming the group under the name Girlfriends in 2009, principal songwriters Ben Potrykus and Andy Sadoway have largely ignored indie trends leaking from the Inchindustry citiesInch in favor of churning out earnest, expertly-crafted pop and post-punk laced with some of the tightest punk poetry around. The band took their biggest risk in the studio, electing to record Wolves of Want purely analog with 16 tracks. InchEven with a relatively small number of tracks, we were able to bring in some additional instruments that we hadn't added to our palette before cello, trumpet, trombone to name a few,Inch says Sadoway. InchMy favorite part of tracking was when Luke and I got to play a Steinway grand together during the outro of 'New Starts in Old Dominion.'Inch Thematically, Wolves of Want is an album full of meditations on mental illness, the struggle to bring goodness into the world, and faith in humanity as a renewable resource. These themes are particularly personal to Potrykus who was diagnosed with multiple anxiety disorders after experiencing acute symptoms on-and-off for years.

The 20th century, the century of totalitarianism, has undoubtedly been marked by the horror of mass, industrialized crime. The world of music, like any other, could not have been oblivious to the ominous events brought by, as Karl Popper would say, the enemies of open society. Accordingly, we find a wide range of attitudes, from musicians of unwavering affinity towards totalitarian regimes, to those who were ousted, or in the worst of cases, even murdered by their compatriots in power. None of the three composers present on this album are at any of the extremes mentioned, but their respective biographies were indelibly marked by Soviet repression or National Socialism, or at worst by both. Beyond these historical circumstances, the great success of Mario Prisuelos in making this programme has been to detect how the three works he has chosen for his recording, written in a time interval of approximately a quarter of a century, are exemplary in terms of reflecting certain aesthetic changes of his time.

The Resonare Fibris project arises from the need to confront times, that is, to put them in dialogue and submit them to a game of mirrors. Superposition and mixture, contraposition, dissolution, decontextualization, deconstruction... ways of proposing an approach to music that goes beyond proposing a merely contemplative listening to become a challenge that of achieving an active listening. The meeting and dialogue with the pianist Mario Prisuelos, the poet Pilar Martín Gila and myself, gave shape to a proposal where music and poetry share a common point the reinterpretation of a past time, that of the Spanish Renaissance. This dialogue between the ancient and the present stems from essential voices among others, Tomás Luis de Victoria, Francisco Guerrero, Cristóbal de Morales or Sebastián de Vivanco. The work is written for piano and electronics, where the latter is conceived as a spatial extension of the instrument.