Disquiet

Listening to the piece “Gesine IV” (MP3) on guitarist Giuseppe Ielasi’s album Gesine (Hapna), one could be excused for hearing words in one’s head: “Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming / We’re finally on our own.” It’s not that his solo guitar piece, with touches of percussion, directly resembles Neil Young’s Woodstock-era hymn, but that it summons it in spirit. The lingering ghosts of rock’s past take a second form later in “Gesine IV,” when a drone of feedback brings to mind another Woodstock moment, the peak of Jimi Hendrix’s rewrite of “The Star Spangled Banner.” Add a third early rock trendsetter, Robert Fripp and his self-layering guitar landscapes, and you’ve pretty much triangulated Gesine as a whole (all six tracks), though in fact it could as easily be mistaken for an errant bit of Amsterdam free improvisation as for new weird folk. Ielasi is Italian, and he has collaborated with Dean Robers, Gino Robair, Brandon Labelle and others. Learn more at hapna.com.

By Marc Weidenbaum