Loren MazzaCane Connors
Airs

A man and his guitar...

Ah, how many happy, bitter, or bittersweet memories tied to this bucolic image.

It is the archetype of the musician, practically an ominous and sublime symbiosis, as in the case of Loren Connors.

As it stands, the world of folk and, in my opinion, the more intransigent concrete music and the various undergrowths generated by these have a huge debt to this New York artist, who since the late seventies has wandered solitary across the misty lands of the planet, after having played/collaborated with other pioneers/madmen such as Jim O'Rourke, Keiji Haino; and how can one forget the supergroup Haunted House, together with another genius named Andrew Burnes (San Agustin)??

And anyway, we know that New York has been for ages the cradle of tightrope walkers and wizards of the strings, if we think of people like La Monte Young, or Rhys Chatman.
 
Connors' music is a sublime and evocative non-music, in which the "timbre" of the instrument takes on a predominant position compared to the other well-known musical concepts, rhythm first: in the case of "Airs", about twenty compositions for electric guitar dated 1997, metallic strings that wind and reveal crystalline, rugged soundscapes; there is certainly, hidden under layers of reverberations and silences, a serialistic intent, given the insistence of the dynamics that make the pieces appear congruent, at first glance similar to each other or contiguous, in an ambiguous configuration and cyclically reproposed in a different key...

The entire corpus of trembling sound suspensions is sordidly dedicated to P. B. Shelley, the nineteenth-century English poet sadly lost among the waves, imagine that, while rowing resolutely to challenge the storm (in the grip of who knows what romantic-mystical impulse) off the coast of Lerici, near La Spezia.

I went back through the dense discography of Mazzacane Connors to find an album that, in my opinion, represents him well in the guise of a musician, but also of a poet, beyond the evocative nature of the title... In fact, over the years, collections of poetry by Loren have also been released, sometimes accompanied by music; appetizing delights that surely are expensive on eBay, if they can be found, now, we say, centuries later....