Divagar Devagar

Pedro Velasco - guitar & electronics

Release date - 27/10/2023

Available on CD/DIGITAL

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Pedro Velasco is London based but was born in Lisbon; his exquisite guitar music seems to emerge from the distant past of his childhood and beyond, the Brazilian music in which his household was immersed and which first inspired him to pick up a musical instrument, aged 12 years old – the samba, perhaps, or maybe even the melancholic strains of Fado.

On the hauntingly brilliant and deeply personal Divagar Devagar, he steps out of time, into the fathomless realms of memory, divining and picking out shapes and compositions which speak of musics, hybrids as yet unborn.

The glimmering ebb and throb of Velasco’s guitars are occasionally reminiscent of the sound-world created and inhabitated by Jan Garbarek, the nocturnal fjords of Paths, Prints in particular, on “Canção do Vidoeiro”, or “A História do Miudo Que Era Porteirio”. The title track’s sober introspection, meanwhile, bears faint resemblance, in spirit at least, to british post-punk band, The Durutti Column. There are other, more oblique reminders - of Jimi Hendrix’s searing hot searchings, on the unexpectedly heavy “O Armário do Tio Paulo”, its drones squeezing, oozing from the fretboard like plasticine, of Stockhausen’s ethereal and highly textured electro-acoustic work, Kontake, or the dark, slap-delay and solitary human blues of John Fahey’s final masterwork, Red Cross. Ultimately, however, Velasco feels alone and unmatched in the aqueous zones he has mapped out for himself.

Divagar Devagar is ambient yet assertive – Velasco is clearly a master of his own intention – here is experimental music that doesn’t merely beautify the listeners environment, it disquiets, intrigues, takes us down dark alleyways off the main thoroughfare of expectation – it pushes out onto still water, unsure of its destination, twisting and turning in the uneasy bliss of the moment. Far from outstaying their welcome, tracks like “Conversas de Café” are fleeting, tantalisingly enigmatic miniatures, like charcoal sketches or cinematic excerpts whose fuller context is unclear, fragments of longer stories.

Remarkably no edits nor overdubs were made in the recording or mixing of the album. What is heard, is what happened.