Abstrakce Records / Spain / 2019
"I close my eyes, I open my memory, the pages go free: infinite images like a book of sand." - Pablo Guerrero
"Creating collages of avant-garde ambience using instruments from the many corners of the earth, along with tape loops and samples, Finis Africae created a fourth world sound that was both exotic and mysterious." - Andy Thomas
First vinyl edition ever of this lost experimental Spanish essential album. A delicate work that absorbs specific aspects of different music - minimalism, tribal sounds, new age, ambient, spoken word - to create its particular universe.
With an absolutely contemplative recording climate, the poems and their sound environments explore the deepest self of the poet and singer from Extremadura, Pablo Guerrero. The work combines memories of childhood through the valleys of his native village, Esparragosa de Lares, with the evolution of life to reach the contemplative state in adulthood. A score written in a collaboration with two old friends, Juan A. Arteche Gual and Juan C. Fdez Puerta (Finis Africae), who weave a beautiful tapestry of electronic sounds so that the deep and serious voice of the poet shells all the images that his ode encloses.
The recording, through fourteen poems, breathes an aroma of maturity, balance and total freedom. Maturity and balance with minimal arrangements, small gestures surrounded by abundant silences. Total freedom with instruments of the most varied, without restrictions or complexes: samplers, synthesizers and field recordings mixed with rattles, self-arches of the Appalachian Mountains, zithers, saxes made with reeds, conches, shortwave radios, plastic pipes, Hindu harmoniums ... beauty can arise from any element and all these minimal arrangements come together to create the perfect ambience that sublimates the poem.
Completed in the spring of 1996, the recording was moving in no man's land until the end of 1999 saw the light in book format of poems, accompanied by a CD. A co-edition of Música sin Fin ( Juan A. Arteche own label) and Cicón ediciones (a small Extremaduran editorial) that, when released in book format, went unnoticed. Abstrakce records aims to recover this masterpiece of experimental Spanish music, contributing its bit to place the album where it deserves. Therefore, a very careful edition is presented, with a folder printed in letterpress with lead types, accompanied by an extensive booklet in both English and Spanish containing liner notes, lyrics, an interview with Juan F. Puerta and a text by Juan A. Arteche about of the recording of the album.