Luca Margoni - Lignea Phoenix (Italian Contemporary Music For Classical, Electric And Midi Guitar) (2021)

“Lignea Phoenix” means “Wooden Phoenix”. This is a definition that effectively captures the fate of an instrument such as the guitar which, over the centuries, has died and resurrected over its ashes, each time assuming a different shape, always renewing its expressive language.
Luca Margoni “One needs a myth”. Thus wrote Cesare Pavese in his Feria d’agosto, underpinning the absolute value of childhood in human life. The myth of the phoenix, a mysterious and fantastic bird, capable of being continually reborn out of its ashes, is certainly one of the most attractive, mutable and durable myths in human history. Unsurprisingly, then, it is precisely the phoenix, turned into a precious chiseled wooden sculpture, that embraces with its luminous complexion the ten stars (ten, not eleven as in firmament) constituting the musical constellation of this album.
Myth contributes by imparting firmness and continuity to rebirth, to the joyful transmutation of appearance, to the many possible reconfigurations dictated by the passing of the musical languages and by the unexpected seduction of new technologies. This happens jointly with the resurfacing of remote layers, of distant landscapes, sedimented within Western music history, and led by hand, here, by a versatile and “mythical” instrument, such as no other can be in our epoch, suffocated by music.
The guitar’s six strings, as if representing the lines of an imaginary hexagram (so it was in the ancient tablatures) enclose within a narrow aural space an infinite palette of timbral resources. These are all the more valuable precisely because they are constrained within such a thin container, even though this was amplified in time thanks to the introduction of electric wires and electronic strings.
However, the guitar is always itself. It is the silentious and monologuing instrument par excellence; the instrument capable of dancing en pointe and of inviting to dance. It can distil, to the sensitive ear, the single sound within fatally multiple gestures (chords, arpeggios, clusters), or even break the ‘beautiful sound’ by forcing the euphonic limit proper to it, with extreme, tactile, noise-music solutions ranging from the glass-like immobility of the hyper-high harmonics to the wide percussive palette, to the acid timbres of sounds extracted from around the bridge.

Tracklist
01. Sospese linee affioranti
02. Point, Ligne et Surface: I. Point
03. Point, Ligne et Surface: II. Ligne
04. Point, Ligne et Surface: III. Surface
05. In Voce Omen Stat (For Electric Guitar and Automated DAW)
06. Attese (For Guitar and Live Electronics)
07. GB#01
08. Otto variazioni
09. Isomorphic Dance (For Electric Guitar and Live Electronics)
10. Cinque Bagattelle: No. 1, Notte
11. Cinque Bagattelle: No. 2, Vita moderna
12. Cinque Bagattelle: No. 3, Elegia (in memoria di Giovanni De Falco)
13. Cinque Bagattelle: No. 4, Sterminator Vesevo
14. Cinque Bagattelle: No. 5, Tremulo il rimembrare
15. Mister C (For Midi Guitar And Live Electronics)
16. Dolce e chiara è la Notte