Ralph Towner
Time Line

As I write, the noise of a stubborn drill pierces the space that separates one of the apartments overlooking the courtyard from the office where I am.

Even the particles of sound generated by the traffic in the street find a way to penetrate and spread, merging with the background hum of computers, with the thickening of dialogues that suddenly, as if the people present had agreed, come to life simultaneously.

I wonder if the space in which you find yourself is even more saturated with sounds, or if instead, you are immersed in silence while reading.

But there is probably another kind of noise for you too, a background noise that does not come from the outside. That silent din you sometimes feel, even in the absence of sounds. It progresses by accumulation, feeding on scraps of thoughts, suspended conversations, shreds of 'reality', fragments of the chaos surrounding us. Filtered through cracks opened in your attention, increasingly forced into constant operation. A noise that is inside you.

For his new album (the twenty-first released by ECM, in addition to those with the Oregon), the American guitarist chooses to record the sound of his guitars, 12-string and classical, in the absorbed and 'natural' space of a church. In a monastery among the mountains of Austria.

I admit a partial knowledge of Towner's work and only a few listens to other solo records, like 'Anthem' also on ECM, from 2001. Others, therefore, could certainly devote more extensive pages to his new work.

But I believe that even a less 'experienced' listener can perceive the distilled perfection of such a record. And try to reflect its glints.

Literally a sonic oasis: what happens during the listening of the sixteen tracks is the small miracle achieved by a sound—in this case, that of the two guitars—that brings the rarefied quality of the silence in which it was produced, in which it was 'reverberated,' into our space to be captured on a record.

And within this rarefaction unfolds the crystalline nature pictures that the musician has written.

Or that he improvises, as in the very brief glimpses (or glances) of 'Five Glimpses', almost placed at the center of the record. And perhaps it is precisely those four minutes, those very few hinted notes, that constitute somehow the heart of a work that shines, in other moments, even for its seemingly simple 'accountability'. The one that permeates the line of 'If,' for example.

Or for the evocative power contained among the arpeggios with which Towner weaves the fabric of a tribute to Sicily, in 'Oleander Etude' and 'Lizards Of Eraclea'.

But the entire album is an evocation, both in the most relaxed and 'empty' moments and in the accelerations in clusters of notes. An evocation of a place perhaps known to us even without realizing it. Of spaces illuminated by the quality of a sound that suffices for itself. By a technique that never betrays the intention to amaze and perhaps is appreciated even more in its lyrical essentiality when, for example, it tackles 'Come Rain Or Come Shine' by Harold Arlen and 'My Man's Gone Now' by George Gershwin.

And it is an album you will return to many times, to savor the details of each single passage.

For now, you let it flow, like a stream. At times steep and swift, or slowing down, after a dive between rocky walls, into a more placid flow between grassy banks.

The neighbors' drill has stopped insisting. Perhaps it happened a while ago, I couldn't say.

An unusual quiet reigns in the office, only the hum of the machines continues relentlessly.

Someone asks for a copy of 'that music we heard'.

Ralph Towner waves goodbye with a hand, walking away from the monastery, at a distant point among the mountains of Austria.

Soon I will go out into the traffic towards the meticulously organized and noisy unnecessary and superfluous.

But for now, I stay a little longer to listen to the echo of those guitars. Its delicate yet sure persistence.

That has silenced, for a while, even another noise. The same that, sometimes, perhaps you 'hear' too.