Alberto Ziliotto and Monakos have published “Cantus Nativitas”. And on the occasion of the release of the album, we asked the composer and guitarist Alberto a few questions.
Marco Sica: “Cantus Nativitas” is suspended between settings, rarefactions and delicate touches of the guitar reaching out to the sacral. The title of the disc and of the single pieces trace clear directions. How was “Cantus Nativitas” born and the theme linked to it?
Alberto Ziliotto - It was born to tell the journey of the family of Jesus during the period of the nativity, not only from a Christian point of view but also from a historical point of view. Monakos and I imagined this journey full of dangers, it is no coincidence that the first track is called Herodes to remember that there was a King who wanted to kill a child even before it was born. We thus wanted to evoke desert landscapes in music.
MS ": Can Cantus Nativitas ”be considered, from a compositional point of view, a point of arrival or a transition towards future different forms of expression?
AZ - For sure it's a transition to a more modern language on the acoustic guitar. My penultimate work “Reverse” already contained some sounds that we reproposed in “Cantus Nativitas” as reverse delay and PAD recorded all starting from guitar sounds then distorted pitchats reverberated modulated and processed in order to make the guitars look like pads. Monakos in his work uses a lot of background effect guitar to a clean sound to enrich the stereo image and give a sense of modernity to the overall sound. We immediately agreed on the mix and the choice of sounds because the idea of this album is to make you feel how you can rejuvenate the acoustic guitar to propose something new, not trivial and done with style.
MS: In an era increasingly aimed at liquid music and rapid fruition, he has released a "listening" disc, in some ways "meditative". How do you place your artistic expression with respect to the current musical world?
AZ - The genus of the fingerstyle from which we started is used a lot nowadays to make covers including "pyrotechnics" with a predominant use of percussive techniques, we wanted to go against the trend by giving more space to melody and emotions (the cd was recorded live and post product) because we believe it is better to have fewer listeners but more quality. There are musicians who publish much more often but with less quality content, in doing so they are more active on social networks and potentially have more followers, but the problem is that the music content loses quality. The intent was to publish something new, a kind of manifesto that expresses our idea of what it means to play and produce an acoustic guitar cd in 2021.
Considerations
"Cantus Nativitas" is not just an acoustic guitar album, Alberto and Monakos wanted to give a precise direction to the sound of the modern acoustic guitar by showing the potential of sounds that can be created starting from the guitar to create something new giving a lot of weight to the melody. The innovation starts from simple ideas but full of emotions like the songs on this album.
