Maurizio Abate
Standing Waters

THE REVIEW

Facing an album like this, it's inevitable to reference John Fahey, a musician and composer rightly considered both virtuosic and among the most influential in the world of modern music. A kind of guru, the father of that solo folk guitar style that critics have aptly named "american primitive guitar," grasping in his minimalist style the same sensitive content of the cultural movement that roots back to the 1700s and aimed to redefine the relationship between man and the surrounding world, centering the individual in a dimension stripped of every conditioning.

In the conceptual direction traced by John Fahey, composer Maurizio Abate seeks an effective combination between an instinctive approach to the guitar, yet simultaneously experimental, focused on a natural and primitive connection with the sound and the instrument. The sensitive component of his compositions perfectly adapts to the exclusive preference for music productions characterized by a strong emotional component and the ability to develop and elaborate the same through meditative processes typical of Boring Machines. A partnership renewed with "Standing Waters," a work consisting of five acoustic tracks in which Maurizio, in addition to the guitar, also plays the harmonica and the piano (used sparingly yet in a precious and very significant manner) as well as the hurdy-gurdy, also known as "ghironda" and essentially a polyphonic "chordophone" whose origins date back to the distant 12th century. Mention must be made of the collaborations with cellist Matteo Bennici and with "Lux" (moniker of Lucia Violetta Gasti of Mechanical Tales) on the violin.

"Standing Waters" is a work of inner research: an active acquiescence in a process of spiritual growth that is accompanied by breathing exercises dictated by the beats of the time structures drawn by Abate. The style and clearly evocative atmospheres directly reconnect us to the roots of the previously mentioned primitivism, an artistic movement that has been renewed since the early nineties with the experimentalism of influential artists like David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke (I would also mention Ben Chasny) and more recently with the works of James Blackshaw or the "pastoral" atmospheres of Glenn Jones and the works of Mark Fosson. A worthy successor of this musical school, Abate disentangles himself in minimalist compositions of a hypnotic nature, of which I would mention "Nymphs Dance" and particularly "Standing Crumbling": harmonic sequences that - apparently static - are manifestations that escape the eye, but not the other senses, and that as such are transmitted and communicated only through the arts, which here acquire a dignity that surpasses mere entertainment and every form of self-indulgence, seeking contact with the real until they recognize themselves as "man."