Ventschau [LP]

Ventschau is Raphael Vanoli's second solo album, following Bibrax. The album takes it's name from a small village in northern Germany where Vanoli stayed on writing retreats between 2018 and 2023. The forest, and long stretches of being alone in it, shaped how the music moves. Ventschau is an ode to that love of the forest - poetic and personal, with more room than before for melody, harmony, and song-like shapes. Mantra-like figures recur; on several pieces Vanoli sings softly into the strings, so breath, voice, and resonance carry as a single sound. At the core of the record are the ""blowing"" techniques Vanoli has been developing for years - sounds drawn from breath against the strings of a hyper amplified electric guitar, alongside the full range of artefacts and resonances such a guitar can be made to reveal, among them the voice itself, sung through the strings. This is the sound world of the instrument as he hears it, and it has kept opening since Bibrax. The spectrum of solo electric guitar widens further here as those techniques share the room with more conventional playing and a broader palette: a Fender Bass VI, a 12-string electric, and on one piece a steel-string acoustic.Some of the pieces lean into fragility and let it stay. Others are epic and densely detailed - wall-of-sound passages that move across the whole frequency range, from the high crispness of an insect world down to sub-low, earthquake-like rumble. All of it is made live, in real time, on a single guitar - which makes the comparison to a classical recital literal rather than figurative: technically, that's what it is.All the pieces are his, written across those five years, except ""Alti Plano,"" which draws on a traditional Bolivian melody. The record was made live to tape in May and August 2023 at Electric Monkey Studio in Zaandam, with Kasper Frenkel engineering. Almost everything is analogue, apart from a few pedals. Vanoli kept the number of takes low and let the rough edges stay where they fell.