Lost Chords by Guillaume Gargaud
LABEL: Dead Pilot Records

I love the guitar. When I started playing music in high-school, it was all about rock and power chords, and even throughout my gradual appreciation for all forms of music and their processes of creation, my deep affection for the guitar as an expressive sound form has never really faltered. I’ll never really been into synthesizers and drum machines. And although there are a wealth of superb electronic composers out there who use the guitar as their foundation, it’s always well-acquainted with electronic instruments to augment some of the initial limitations of the instrument in the electronic genre.

“...the finest example of contemporary guitar composition that I’ve yet come across...seems to herald a whole new approach to traditional instruments that are still bogged down in the tube amp and three-chord world.”

Then there’s Guillaume Gargaud. A trained improviser, Gargaud seems continually inspired by the possibilities within the guitar itself to create startlingly new sounds and textures, aided by software, loopers, and a small host of stomboxes to coax all the necessary timbres from just one instrument instead of aided by swathes of synth wash and field-recordings.

On his latest record, 2011’s Lost Chords, Gargaud has created an essential piece of music for the electronic avant-garde, a masterwork that ranks alongside Fennesz’s Black Sea in regards to its sophistication, attention to detail, influence and brilliance. While being an electronic record, it also stands as a beautiful solo guitar record, recalling elements of Steffen Basho-Junghans or Nick Drake.

Listening to Lost Chords is a journey through brittle and glitched timbres enveloping a core of beautiful and haunting melodies, bridling against their dissonant sonic partners to create a work of inexhaustible layers and complexity, all the while never losing sight of how important good songwriting is. It’s avant-garde noisemaking, for sure, but each piece feels like a song, not just an unmoving cacophony of knob-turning (not that indulgent knob turning isn’t intriguing, just rarely gratifying).

The album is probably the finest example of contemporary guitar composition that I’ve yet come across, and its release at the beginning of this year seems to herald a whole new approach to traditional instruments that are ususally bogged down in the tube amp and three-chord world. Traditional adventurists and adventurous traditionalists should definitely seek this astonishing little gem out, just to see what’s possible. And for all admirers of the different and dynamic, Lost Chords is ten pieces of gorgeous sound.


REVIEWED BY NEIL LEVENS
NEIL’S FAVORITE TRACKS: “Revir de Courir” • “Oeil Humide” • “Longue Route”

  Guillaume Gargaud - Oeil Humide by Dead Pilot records