The way of the guitar into New Age music

The CD “Las Nieblas del Olvido” may easily open your heart to the primary methods of recording music and get you enough close to the performer. Sometimes few instruments can fully cover all expectations of the listener, especially if they are presented in a proper way. Pepe Acevedo is from those artists, who follows the path of creating music, like mainly walk all over from his favourite instrument. In this case the music here speaks with the voice of the guitar.

Although all tracks are instrumentals, still catch attention and enchant in some own way. Everything mould one different world, where the tenderness and acoustic feeling fly on the wings of music. All compositions blend magically itself, despite the same source of musicians. The presence of guitar lines, speaks for intelligence approach of composing, like considering that the “Guitar” is the second rich instrument after the “Piano”, you can imagine!!!. The skillful guitar melodies, arpeggios, chords, double lines and harmonies, take our notice of Pepe Acevedo, who perform in magnificent way in this album. The variety is huge and moves beyond all expectations for relaxing music.

I can’t miss to give a credit also to all musicians took part in Pepe’s album. Jesus Guirao played on drums. Both rhythmic and soft shades of drumming, nice performance and I can truly say that the drums are top notch recorded in this album. Ana Lloasas played keyboards and piano. It adds mellow background with bells, pads and synths and the piano inserts pleasant acoustic character with nostalgic tinge.

Somehow the music reminiscent to Pat Metheny’s works with strong position in the jazz genre. The acoustic guitar is miscible between smooth jazz progression chords and traditional Spanish way of sounding. I can also match with 3rd Force music, especially in their gentle row. I like the way how all this is mixed with some synthetic sounds, coming from the keyboards or computer MIDI programming…It is good example how the new style meets the out of date such.

Speaking so good things, I have to share also a few flaws I find out, while listening to “Las Nieblas del Olvido”. On a first impression I noticed that the sound quality is less than an average level by my view, there is a noise possibly added from the guitar amp or from the instrument itself, which is not cleaned properly. The whole sound picture is a little muddy and pretty tightly, I miss the transparency in the frequency space, especially when we have so much acoustic instruments in the recording. On other side looking only musically I think, that the guitar lines are not well dosed. In some moments they comes in more than I can handle with my ears during one full listening of the album. I think Pepe went too far with the presence of the guitar in the arrangements, which deprive of individuality a bit the rest instruments. The music turns into more technical than harmonious. Step aside of those notes, everything else looks promising.

My favourite tracks here are “Lorena”, “El Regreso” and “Las Nieblas del Olvido”. It really touched me specially.

One album which speaks with the soul of the guitar, one another view of the New Age music, it’s more than instrumental, looks potential and get you ready for one dreamy performance on stage.

Pepe Acevedo
http://thestorm.iespana.es/pepebio.htm