Spanish artist Clara De Asís is a proponent of active listening, which manifests itself
on Sans Nom Ni Forme as partaking in
a carefully plotted menagerie of guitar tones. For me, who’s all about that guitar
tone, doesn’t matter if it’s Slash and Yngwie, I was ready for action. I’m all
about active listening, and also air guitar playing! Then, De Asís threw me the curveball that you
smart readers could all see coming from a mile (or sixty feet, six inches)
away, and I realized I was thinking of something completely different.
Clara De Asís
is incredibly deliberate in her composition. Notes are struck, but one at a
time, the sound allowed to reverberate into the environment and take on ambient
properties of the room. Feedback is teased and dared to become sentient.
Humming drones form sonic equivalents of quiet lakes across which dinghies are
rowed as storm clouds gather. No matter how much the outside world works to
distract from these delicate pieces, you must never let it in – active
listening demands that you devote your full attention to the Sans Nom Ni Forme. And even if it
somehow does get in, how does Sans Nom Ni
Forme interact with it?
That’s the curiosity. But trust me, it works better
if you’re fully invested, fully focused on De Asís’s playing. It’s hypnotic in the end. Not like Dave Mustaine
at all.
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