a shadow fulguration is a free improvised meeting of American, San Francisco-based experimental guitarist Ernesto Diaz-Infante with Swedish-American, Lisbon-based cellist-guitarist Helena Espavall, who has been collaborating with Diaz-Infante since 2002, and recorded with him the duo album, A Hallowed Shell of Ash and Dust (Eroto Tox Decodings, 2013), with Diaz-Infante’s partner Marjorie Sturm on flutes and percussion. The album was recorded at Opalacete in Lisbon in June 2023, with Diaz-Infante playing only acoustic guitar, Espvall adding backing vocals and electronics to her cello and acoustic guitar, and Sturm playing Nepalese flutes, bells, and percussion. This album celebrates this long-term friendship and collaborative musical work with a series of seven extended, effects-laden, layered but unhurried, spacious, and peaceful pieces that flirt with psychedelic folk and resonant drones. By some divine intervention, it was released on Espvall and her partner, Derek Espvall’s, anniversary, and on Strum’s birthday. Derek Espvall recorded, edited, mixed, and mastered the album and took the cover photo.
Live at Day of Noise collects two extended, 30-minute improvisations of Diaz-Infante, playing electric guitar, with his son Ezra Sturm, on electric guitar and synth, with Marjorie Sturm on flute. The first improvisation was recorded at the Day of Noise 2024 in KZSU Stanford 90.1 FM radio in February 2024, and the second – a faster and more structured rehearsal tape that occasionally even flirts with brief, melodic themes – at Diaz-Infante’s home studio in January 2024. The atmosphere in this effects-lafden family affair is spacious but spiky, distorted and at times evn noisy, or as the father and son call it: «a swirling, heady vacuum created by slashing the strings of experimental guitar. Curating the pulse emitting echo through the cacophonic feedback of sirens with every fiber of intent».
The connection of Diaz-Infante with fellow American instrument builder, improviser, and the head of the label Public Eyesore, Bryan Day goes back to the nineties. Day released Diaz-Infante’s trio album A Barren Place of Overwelming Simplicity and his solo album My Benign Swords (Public Eyesore, 2004 and 2016). Day and Diaz-Infante shared the same bill at Lugagge Store Gallery Music series in 2022, but only in November 2023 they recorded their debut duo album Untitled Currents at Day’s home studio in San Pablo. Day also did the cover artwork. The fourteen short pieces, with Diaz-Infante on acoustic and electric guitars and Day on amplified, homemade instruments, are focused, intense, dissonant, and uncompromising sonic collisions, performed with great imagination and some subversive, quirky humor. Often, it is hard to know who is doing what and how. As in all the releases of the Scottish label scatterArchive it is offered in pay what you can afford.
Díaz-Infante structures the four-part improvisation of Pocket Strings on British pioneer free improviser-guitarist Derek Bailey’s title song from the album Drop Me Off At 96th (scatterArchive, 1994). Bailey was a seminal influence on Diaz-Infante’s guitar playing. The album was recorded at Díaz-Infante’s home studio in June 2024. He experiments with Bailey’s experimental approach., but Bailey used a 1936 Epiphone Triumph guitar to record this mercurial blues while Díaz-Infante chose to play on a practice tool for guitarists – the pocket strings, created to help build finger strength and calluses with real strings, real frets, and a strum pad for rhythm. He extends this piece, but also distills its essence with the pocket strings, but it is a way too long experiment.
Eyal Hareuveni
Ernesto Díaz-Infante (acoustic guitar, electric guitar, pocket strings), Helena Espvall (cello, acoustic guitar, electronics), Marjorie Sturm (Nepalese flute, ceremonial bells, small percussion), Ezra Sturm (electric guitar, synthesizer), Bryan Day (invented instruments)
