Italian guitarist Alessandro "Asso" Stefana has gall. For his solo debut, Poste e Telegrafi, Stefana treats his guitar like a quarter-piece of the puzzle. He collaborates with six people and avoids the guitar altogether on two of these seven tracks. He alternately employs the 1980s electronics artifact the omnichord, a "strings machine," various African percussion instruments, and vinyl loops to build intricate, subtly shaped substrates for his meticulous, twang-redolent guitar fantasies. Largely because it avoids the solo guitar record template, Poste e Telegrafi is one of the most striking works you'll hear from a young composer all year.
It's not as if Stefana is hiding anything. His guitar playing is graceful and dexterous, his fluid phrases are precise without feeling stiff. He's not trying to make himself sound better by playing with slouches, either. The cast here includes guitar maverick Marc Ribot, Italian songwriter Marco Parente, and Brian Eno/Nick Cave collaborator Leo Abrahams. But of special interest is Ribot, who's spent the past two decades planting six-string sparks in albums like Tom Waits' Rain Dogs, Richard Buckner's Devotion & Doubt, and several volumes of John Zorn's Film Works. A young guitarist and composer trying to establish himself while asking Ribot to take a solo on his debut is tantamount to Menomena asking David Byrne to sing a song on their first record. But on "Poste e Telegrafi Blues", Stefana and Parente build a bouncing groove, all heavy, stutter-step drums and arpeggiating electronics, only for Ribot to light it on fire. He swoops in and hurls out one of the most vital, urgent solos of his career, his savage, gritty tone biting Keith Richards circa "Sympathy for the Devil" while teasing out the melody in broken clips and phrases like your favorite saxophonist between 1960 and 1967. It's a brilliant minute.
Smartly, "Blues" is both the album's centerpiece and climax, the track's frenetic action a fitting apex for the three cuts surrounding it on either side. The rest of Poste e Telegrafi either builds to or from Ribot's massive solo through Stefana's beautiful guitar-and-sidemen hazes. "Semi Tostada di Cielo", the anchor of the first half, showcases Stefana alone, his Bill Frisell-built guitar phrases registering like sentimental confessions without words. But much like one of his few ranking contemporaries, James Blackshaw, Stefana is only intrigued by the sound of his own guitar only to a point. Midway through the nine-minute odyssey, he corrodes his own pearl, fancying a cacophony of hammered West African percussion staple the balaphon and letting barely perceptible guitar tones slip beneath. The guitar ultimately crawls from the confusion, emerging shaken, its slow, sliding moan a bit closer to expiring in the song's second half.
The album's falling action hinges on "Whales Cemetery," Stefana's duet with Enrico Gabrielli's bass clarinet. Stefana's playing is reserved and razor thin here, setting the bait for Gabrielli's colossal terratone. When it arrives, it shakes the framework, pushing the capacity of its microphone and your speakers, and saturating the ground beneath Stefana's Morricone-like portrait. It's dramatic and careful, a more compelling use of torpid, heavy winds than either Earth or Sunn 0))) has found through Steve Moore's trombone on Hex, Altar and Hibernaculum. Gabrielli's clarinet is impressive, in large part, because of Stefana's constraint as a composer and arranger. That is, Gabrielli's presence means so much because he plays for much less than half of the piece.
All of Stefana's compositions are defined somewhat by negative space, meaning he's able to say as much with the absence of a note as he is with the presence of 20. Opener "Western Soda" stumbles forward in regular rhythmic convulsions, a junk percussion loop reminiscent of Tom Waits' Real Gone allowing Stefana's picked-and-strummed banjo notes to drop casually and naturally, like hued leaves in the autumn wind. On the austere "Motel", Stefana climbs up and down one gentle pattern, eventually doubling the guitar and letting faint veils of feedback and a web of cymbal scrapes fall between his most distant notes.
The ends of Stafana's phrases, though, are about not perfecting the right note, but, instead, letting the assumed resolution arrive slightly altered. The climax, to wit, is one lonesome pedal steel note pushed through a web of effects. It sounds more like Glenn Branca conducting 100 guitars than one being built into something else entirely, like a cathedral carved from a single stone. These are rare talents for someone so young, and, given Poste e Telegrafi, Stefana sounds as if he'll be wielding them among the heavyweights for a long time to come.