Solo percussion isn’t such a barren and simply rhythmic event that one might think. There are many examples of this, like, for instance the works by Matthias Kaul (on hat [now] ART) and, in this case, Mr. Gustavo Aguilar, who presents adventurous and innovative music (with some reservations on the package later in the review...) on his solo percussion CD on the Acoustic Levitation label.

Aguilar isn’t only a performer – a percussionist – but also a composer and a daredevil improviser with an intuitive sense of the suspension of the moment, where timbre, pitch and full-fledged feel converge in balance of color and dynamic force.

L.A. Weekly called him “a one-man tribe of rhythm”, while the Saint Paul Pioneer Press described him as an “intuitive, methodical mystic” – and so be it, though a different set-up of circumstances would have served him better, which I will get to later!

The ring of sound is full and the vibrancy is a finger tapping dubbadabba of highly resonant drums through the first track; Phil Curtis’ “Diaspora”, which also sports acoustic guitar, I think, and marimba in shiny strings of dark and hard wood. Evidently – since Aguilar is the sole performer (?) – he has recorded several tracks played back simultaneously in the final mix. There is too little information on this in the all to barren booklet. It makes no sense to leave out information that might interest us, like the names of all the instruments, for example.

The first track also incorporates Latin singing, giving this bit a south-of-the-border accent – but there’s so much more here, like vocal art on the verge of sound poetry, and a set of rhythms hard to define, all getting behind each others ears all the time…

“You Pass Me By” by John Bergamo is a short piece of deep murmurs of a drooping marimba on a downward drift, soon followed by the bubbling sounds of air being blown throw a straw in water in the beginning of track 3 – “Like A Zebra Towards” by Jonathan Grasse -, combined with crackly glassy sounds, as from regular household drinking glasses hit with wooden sticks… You even get the distinct timbres of gamelan, and Gustavo Aguilar moves in with vocals in English: “A rain holds the Tropics in a crystal cage”… constituting a part of Jose Juan Tablada’s poem “The Southern Cross”.

“Us and Them” provides fast, repetitive Reich-illusionary progressions in a richness of timbres, and clouds of interferences hover in a back-and-forth-swaying suspense. The piece is simply an idea, a whim, it seems, because the piece is so short it sort of ends as soon as it has started, which seems a pity. It could have been evolved much further, and I do wonder what Aguilar’s idea behind the short duration is…

“Obra De La Tierra” by David Johnson is longer, though, with its 13 minutes. This is a more explosive, 1960’s experimental sound world, with violent bursts and accompanying whistles, an erratic progression in wide dynamics, the base drum hitting you in the stomach while really high and shrill pitches tickle your neck and wheezing sounds blow faintly at your tympanic membranes… I must admit that Gustavo Aguilar sounds more like a percussion ensemble here than a solo performer. He is very busy indeed… The whistles and the sometimes frantic, march-like events convey a festival feel, or a happening of sorts. It’s maddening at times…
Again I miss the information concerning the instruments…
There are calmer instances in the piece too, where a kind of thoughtfulness is allowed in amongst all the instruments… Towards the end a “Drumming”-type of minute shrill percussion strokes time gently down the chronologies, accompanied by sounds similar to Laotian khene. At the very end, for a few seconds, a fragment of Rosario Castellanos’ “El Resplandor del Ser” is recited.

“No Timer To Rest” by John Bergamo again is a shorter piece. Resounding violet sounds of marimba fill the floor with soft spheres, and it gets a little darker in the room… Around the walls are placed innumerable dark bottles on shelves, from which the light of a candle is reflected, and a venomous danger is sensed… I could listen to these sounds for the duration of a full-length CD, no doubt. Why does he have to cut it so short!!!

“The River” by Gustavo himself is very intense, with smaller sounds, probably partly from a plucked string instrument. This sounds like a mixture between Chris Forsyth and some Cuban street dance; very tight, very dense, very… close!

“Going My Way” by John Bergamo is a beautiful dreamscape, or just an inward glance of a passer-by on the street-corner. The moment is a fleeting one, barely conceived before it flies off into the dust above a busy street, but it was a moment of a sudden and absent-minded remembrance of something…

The concluding piece is written by no lesser a creative artist than Ernesto Diaz-Infante, of whom I have only enthusiastic judgments to make. His piece is called “SOLUS for solo percussion”, allowed 8 minutes here. It comes across in a meditative feeling dressed in beautiful, extended timbres and sparse attacks. Shrills sounds are bent around the corners of stiff and sturdy hits, and a voice whispers unintelligibly until questions like “quando?” and “donde?” are thrown at you. Generally, this piece is soft-spoken and sensible, with an open mind towards the small sounds that make it up, sometimes amassing to dense walls of glittering proposals, casting a spell of dream waves across your momentary existence.

I am a little suspicious, though, of a CD that is only filled to about 50%. Surely much of this could have been elaborated on further, with interesting results. Issuing LP-length CDs is a strange venture, I think… (and which you seldom encounter nowadays)
The CD is a bit un-together; too dispersed and without a real fix on a sense of artistic direction… I believe Aguilar should allow himself more time, longer durations, to elaborate on a lesser number of ideas, to make his art come across more coherently and forcefully, because evidently there’s lots more where this comes from!