Review of my "Four Inexplicable Cuts" album by Vasco Viviani Viviani, here translated from Italian into English with some sound advice from Ilaria Boffa
"Jeff Gburek is an expanded guitarist, in the sense that in addition to plucking the instrument, his sound vision includes field recordings, acoustic compositions, electronics, poetry, organic objects and much more. He also studies Balinese and Javanese gamelan, as well as theories from Harry Partch and Iannis Xenakis. It is therefore not surprising that the discovery of some compositions recorded in the field during trips between Poland, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria turn out to be the most exciting thing you can hear in this sweet spring. Wandering and free sound, full of nature, enzymes and fertilizers. The "field" here is not the mere environment, but the dense composition of thriving soil, including flights of insects and croaking that he manages to compress into an exhaustive corpus of sound. The strings of his instruments are combined with the trills and the interventions of human voices, for an undulating portrait of a luxuriant nature in constant movement and in which the human being is but a small element. In the third inexplicable cut, the vision seems to rise aerial and more elegiac, to illustrate a microcosm united with the celestial and cosmic vault. In the fourth movement instead we return to the earth, the tolling of the guitar seems to convey a vision of the field, a sort of contemplative communion of the environment, with melodies painting a picture of placidly harmonious buzz. And as coda, two western-ish sound poems, wide spaces, spread sounds.
Jeff Gburek's is a story to be followed carefully, or, at least, to be accompanied for a part of the journey on the field."
That review nin the original Italian : https://www.sodapop.it/phnx/jeff-gburek-four-inexplicable-cuts-two-new-poems-aloud-in-the-field-akashic-2023/
Review of The Art of Prepared Guitar Volume One by Vasco Viviani, translated by google (I will get around to fixing the weirdities (statements whose intention I could not decipher well enough to translate myself) later, maybe --
Of course, she (the guitar?) is abused but the simulation it is recognizable and still breathes, even if she seems drunk and in orbit (Toggled Modular Gapped Slides). Not everything flows, indeed, sometimes the jam is part of the game and is part of the preparation of the guitar, blocked and forced in disconnected movements. The bravi alternate between sketches of a couple of minutes scarce or very wide drafts ranging from eight to eleven minutes, but the whole disc, more than a collection of songs, should be read as a palette of sketches and attempts, spiluccando here and there. Jeff's hands are always sharp and manage to hit, engage and sometimes distort what we would expect to hear, but they do so leaving us with the image of being right in that room, light wood, in the outback, some snake around and a rocking chair.
Circular, ghostly sounds, where you can hear the echoes of the most stripped down Bill Orcutt or the driest Tom Carter. Sounds that rarely bend to roundness but that keep their path tied like bundles of nerves at low intensity. Following the art of Jeff Gburek is like turning into a small fly for an hour: you turn among the buzzes, discovering new caves, surprising yourself and dodging the blows waiting for the second volume.
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