Guitar Improvisation Music

Nylon Strings Under Ordinary Conditions

Nylon Strings Under Ordinary Conditions finds Philadelphia musician David Dellacroce — an extraordinarily versatile artist, and quite simply one of my favorite guitarists working today — alone with an acoustic guitar, wandering through a collection of minimal, haunted improvisations where very little needs to happen for an entire landscape to appear. Dellacroce plays with that rare understanding that silence is not the absence surrounding music, but part of its material. Notes emerge tentatively, sometimes almost innocently, and are allowed to hover in the air until their contours begin to blur. Melodies seem to remember themselves only partially. Small gestures become apparitions. The wooden body of the instrument breathes, creaks, resonates — a tiny architecture inhabited by fingers, nylon, memory and empty space. There is melancholy here, certainly, but also candor. A peculiar tenderness. Something approaching saudade, perhaps, although the object of longing remains beautifully unclear. These improvisations seem suspended between remembering and forgetting, between the intimacy of someone playing alone in a room and the strange immensity that can suddenly open inside a handful of notes. The guitar dies very softly in Dellacroce’s hands, only to reappear somewhere inside you — still vibrating, long after the room has gone silent. -Sir Kuliktavikt