BMI
Dominic Gaudious : All hopped up (US,2003)**'
Dominic Gaudious has a light, clear and very accessible world fusion style with a taught craftsmanship of flamenco and other finger picking styles. No matter how fast the playing is this lightness in sound remains. The rhythms and other music instruments are basic and simple, but colourful. I like very much the variety of instruments being used on "Saboteur" . There are various worlds evoked, with romantism & remembrance, to eastern ? touches (through use of a beautiful eastern ? instrument*) with an association towards a rock band's sound (with an electric guitar solo) -The song refers to an earlier band, Saboteur, in which Dominic participated with. "All hopped up" is with didgeridoo, popular sounding but appealing with driving rock rhythms, a song that would even lend itself to even more, and that could have more in its core, if played by musicians that would improvise in dialogue form. The play can be brilliantly fresh and clear, and appealing, but sometimes it also falls back on a more predictable sound (like on "It'll be OK"), which happens more often with musicians that arrange their work completely on their own. It's hard to take a distance to your own work and make a two way interaction kind of dynamism between the instruments, when recording the one on top of the other. Sometimes it gets this tension, otherwise it are mostly the rhythmic parts that makes the music more mainstream than it should be, because the guitar playing features itself, when pulling itself towards certain tensions, is rewarding enough. Last track gets the participation of a throat singer.
* after asking about it, it seemed to be a sitar. Then I consider it as a very unusual sound / playing of a sitar.
