Danish guitarist Lars Bech Pilgaard’s music is in the borderland between noise, sacral nerve and organic improvisation. His musical expression always searches for uncharted sonic territories and cultivates unconditional space with room for the abstract and the perversely concrete. Pilgaard is known for such left-off-center bands like Svin and Slowburn and his work with Anja Jacobsen, Marcela Lucatelli and Maria Faust.
Folklórica is Pilgaard’s new audio-visual solo project, a double vinyl, accompanied by a documentary film created by Pilgaard’s long-term visual collaborator Mathias Winther Kjeldsen that tells about its vulnerable creative process, where the string instruments are presented as soulful and sensual soulmates that have established a magical bond with Pilgaard. Pilgaard’s live performances are accompanied by the visual designer Piotr Winievicz, who will design the performance space in a new format every night and create the framework for a sensual, intimate experience.
Pilggard says that Folklórica formulates «the essence» of what he is shaped by in both musical and human senses. The album was created over a decade and consists of raw recordings of Pilggard playing string instruments showcasing the techniques, concepts and inspirations that shaped him as a musician and composer. Surprisingly, all are rooted in his fascination with folk music in all its guises.
The A side of the album features Pilggard playing the bowed acoustic guitar that sounds like an untimely exotic instrument, close in spirit to the Greek lyra or the Persian kamanche. Pilgaars sketches highly resonant, primitive yet spiritual blues drones or mysterious dances and poetic-cinematic musings. The B side is played on prepared acoustic guitar and banjo and offers almost embryonic melodic ideas for imagined, ancient and aboriginal wind and percussive instruments, and one of the pieces here even gives the city of Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso. The banjo sounds like an ancient version of the Eastern tar. The extended two pieces on Sides C and D are played on electric guitar. The first one, «Secrets of Life», is a quiet and meditative, ambient piece where the guitar sounds like an ethereal organ. The second piece, «Land of Fire, Winds of Smoke» is an intense whirlwind that injects generous doses of distortion and fuzz-tinged electricity into primitive guitar traditions.
Folklórica offers a profound insight into Pilgaard’s creative and multifaceted inner world and his most humane perspective on the healing force of music. His poetic playing of string instruments reflects and is in constant dialog with enriching and transformative folk traditions that act as a medium for new encounters between people, traditions and experiences.
Eyal Hareuveni
Lars Bech Pilgaard (bowed guitar, prepared acoustic guitar, banjo, electric guitar)
Sessions – Folklórica from Mathias Winther Kjeldsen on Vimeo.
