«Music for Safe Piece» focuses on the question of parenting while maintaining artistic practice. British, Amsterdam-based guitarist Andy Moor, known from The Ex and Lean Left, and his partner, Italian choreographer Valentina Campora, who initiated the project, began testing the possibility of dancing on stage with their baby, Elio Chaly Campora Moor, who was seven months old at the beginning of the project, as an experiment. The project became a series of eight performances where Campora performed with Elio for a small audience. Moor accompanied her on stage with his guitars and gave a sonic context to this experiment. Each performance was filmed by visual artist Isabelle Vigier (who co-founded with Moor the Unsounds label, and does the graphic design for the label) for the video ‘Safe Piece (a film)’. «Music for Safe Piece» collects many facets of the improvised music played by Moor in these performances with sounds that occurred in the spaces. The release comes with a private link to the film.
Moor played on these performances -recorded at OT301, Zaal 100 and the studio of the dance company LeineRoebana in Amsterdam- as he always does, using intuition, imagination, humor and surprise, with no attempt to soften his thorny playing or suggest his own version of ‘children songs’. Moor knew that Elio would be excited and curious by him scrapping the guitar with a brush and metal file on the fretboard, and feel free to throw a football on the guitar or drag the cables across the floor. «For a small child to approach a musical instrument in this way for me is a great and wonderful start in his or her musical life», Moor concluded.
The music of Moor flows naturally and corresponds with the distinct sounds of Campora dancing around the performance space and the voice of Elio who also walks and talks around the space, or as seen on the cover, is picked by Moor while he still plays the guitar. He sketches brief but sometimes tense and urgent dramas, injects sparse rhythmic patterns and often spices this inspired and imaginative family affair with compassionate, yet sharp ironic perspective. His guitar playing is most of the time close to his intimate duos work with electronics player Yannis Kyriakides or poet Anne-James Chaton, but on «Safe Piece Studio Leina & Roebana, Pt. 1 & 2» and «Safe Piece OT301 Part 4» it gets closer to the tough free-improvised music of Lean Left or to The Ex adopting Ethiopian music themes, and on the last «Safe Piece Ot301, Pt. 8» he even suggests an engaging melody.
Eyal Hareuveni
Andy Moor (g)
