Guitar Poetry (ACT)
Mikael Máni
Released March 29, 2024
DownBeat Four-and-a-Half-Star Review
YouTube:
https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_nWRP4mrzmcTevDdnBzqeYflwcbZw8JWcc
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About:
“I love the music of Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan,” says Icelandic guitarist Mikael Máni. “I think that’s the main reason why I often write songs for the guitar that could just as easily be sung.” Those words bring us to the core of what “Guitar Poetry”, Máni’s debut release on ACT, is all about. This album introduces an instrumentalist who brings passion and expertise not just to his refined and subtle compositions but also to his vivid and fluent improvisation, and who combines all this with a highly skilled singer-songwriter’s clarity and directness. His multilayered music functions well, and on many levels. Mikael Máni calls it a mixture of jazz, rock and impressionism. Yet he never loses the idea of being both accessible and sophisticated. He doesn’t just stimulate listeners intellectually, he also knows how to cut straight through to the emotions.
From the very first song of “Guitar Poetry”, “She’ll Arrive Between 10 & 11”, Máni gives a pointer to the expressive range which listeners can expect throughout the album. The guitarist makes a strong initial impression with the warmth of his acoustic sound: fine, brilliant, spacious. From this, a simple folkloristic melody emerges, a few sparse harmonies – a musical idyll. And then, in the middle of the song, everything turns into noise, becomes gloomy, threatening, almost despairing… and finally finds reconciliation by returning to the calm of the original theme.
Mikael Máni’s mastery of presenting contrasts and of springing musical surprises is exceptional for one so young. And he is also a guitarist with his very own signature style, one which does not lend itself to categorisation within the usual spectrum of the instrument in jazz. His jazz leanings are more evident in his approach to playing than in any obvious affiliation with the genre or the canon. In fact, folk-derived techniques such as finger-picking, or echoes of the blues, Americana and Nordic songs and a unique, cinematic quality are more in evidence. But perhaps most importantly, whereas Máni plays purely instrumentally, his music – always and unmistakably – sings.
Here is an artist for whom the shallowness of competitive virtuosity or instrumental vanity are completely alien. Mikael Máni lets his music flow and creates intensity, sometimes through calm and relaxation, sometimes through energy and small outbursts that can explode briefly from any tonality into noise, only to either find their way back or discover completely new ways out. And sometimes you imagine that there must surely be two or more guitarists playing, such is his skill in creating parallel layers of sound. But, with the exception of two numbers recorded in multi-track, it is always and only Mikael solo: he has the talent to play harmonies, melodies and fragments that then live on and grow in the listener’s mind as essential parts of the fascinating tapestry which he weaves.
The concept of storytelling in music may have been desperately over-worked and become a cliché, but that, quite simply, is what Máni does: all the songs on “Guitar Poetry” tell stories, open up spaces and land-scapes, draw pictures. And they are the reflection of a guitarist who is as unconventional as he is musically approachable, an extroverted introvert whose whole way of being is to assert the primacy of expression and emotion.
Track Listing:
1. Shell Arrive Between 10&11 3:53
2. Katie, Not Klara 3:15
3. What Once Was 3:19
4. Next Time 2:03
5. Tvær Stjörnur 3:49
6. Arachne’s Magical Weaving 3:22
7. The Whole Story 2:43
8. You Know How This Will End 2:26
9. Waiting For The Tram 3:40
10. Maturing Backwards 2:38
11. Closing The Book 1:40
All tracks composed by Mikael Máni Ásmundsson, except Tvær stjörnur composed by Megas
Personnel:
Mikael Máni Ásmundsson: guitar
Recorded 29th November 2023, at The Studio CvA in Amster-dam, by Ido Zilberman
Mixed and Mastered by Birgir Jón Birgisson
Produced by Mikael Máni Ásmundsson
Cover Art by Guðjón Ketilsson, untitled, 1998-2015
paint and varnish on porcelain saucer
Review:
Icelandic guitarist Mikael Máni, the youngest of this bunch, delivers an impressionistic gem in Guitar Poetry. Essentially a solo guitar outing with a couple of tracks featuring overdubbed guitar parts (the gently persuasive “Arachne’s Magical Weaving” and the swirling, psychedelic “Next Time”), it showcases the 28-year-old guitarist on refined and subtle compositions like “She’ll Arrive Between 10 & 11,” which opens with gently picked notes and ends in fusillades of distortion-laced catharsis, and the delightful and delicate “Katie, Not Klara,” which finds him deftly alternating between fingerstyle playing and plectrum playing. In some ways, Máni’s third as a leader recalls Pat Metheny’s intimate, reflective and highly expressive New Chautauqua from 1979.
Bill Milkowski (DownBeat)
