Musical gestures come to life and evolve in Álvaro Domene’s ‘Torsion’. From superimpositions of dense polyrhythms, interlocked scale shifts, to sonics as strata and atmospheric layerings: there is an orientation to overall structures and a simultaneous intense focus on local texture and timbre, a curiosity for micro kernels of motifs and phrases which then give way, scale shifting and voiced by the guitar, to joyous, raging, leaping legatos across a complex percussive soundscape, and then again to vaster, orchestrally textured landscapes. Conceptually, what drives this project? Is it concerned, as one title suggests, with the erosion of sound? Or the erosion of the tools of sound, leading to a collapse and fusion between systems? The pillars of ostinato and recognizable, partly stable rhythms undergird a cloud of unknowing, a reverse labyrinth in registers above. The guitarist’s mind splits and flies mercurial across the other passages of this labyrinth. Textures grained in foreground and farther away, immersive, all clamor for attention: overlapping syntagmas of rhythm and timbre. Pure pleasure of sound and musical formalisms. And cognition in flux.
