Wood warms you three times: when you cut it, when you split it, and when you burn it
— Unknown, rural folk wisdom.
Davide Cedolin is a musician, writer, and painter who has been an active participant in the arts community of Genoa, Italy for two decades. He’s a prolific solo artist who also works closely with musical ensembles TRÓNCO and Japanese Gum. With Ligurian Pastoral, his first release on Island House Recordings, Cedolin offers a look at the rural area he’s called home for the past few years: “a tight and bent strip of land between the Ligurian sea and the Apennines mountains.”
Like other albums in Cedolin’s catalog, Ligurian Pastoral consists of instrumental compositions guided by acoustic guitar, joined here by shades of bowed upright bass and tastefully utilized field recordings. The music is lovely, uncomplicated, and patient. This is borne out of Cedolin’s lived experience of sharing a rural house in the center of the region with his son and partner. Each song is an elegant and moving portrait of a different aspect of his life: the mountain that towered over his childhood (“Beigua”), his recently-settled homestead (“Ca De Cavo”), his son (“Timo”), and a departed and fondly remembered pet (“Elegy for Mythos”).
“Nature,” says Cedolin in an essay that he wrote as a companion to Ligurian Pastoral, “can show and explain events and things better than any person by the cycle of seasons, of life and death, of lightness and darkness, of sowing and cropping.” In his music, Cedolin works towards channeling nature’s revelatory character. The aforementioned individual facets of one man’s life, located in a rural province in northern Italy, are at once singular to this artist and yet rendered universally symbolic of those fundamental elements of life: the house that is a home, affection for a loved one. That artistic refraction between the simple and the universal is no small triumph; Ligurian Pastoral accomplishes the feat of addressing this duality with tender grace and musical beauty.
- Jeff Tobias
credits
released January 20, 2023
All songs composed by Davide Cedolin.
Performed by:
Davide Cedolin: Acoustic Guitar, Organ, Harmonica, Field Recording.
Mike Horn (Seawind Of Battery): Lap Steel and Electric Guitar on “Ca de Cavo (Empty House) and “Lische Alte”.
Tommaso Rolando: Double Bass on “Beigua”
Giacomo Bozzo: Field Recording on “A water relief in the drought of Summer ‘22”.
This album is dedicated in the loving memory of Mythos (2011-2022).
Home recorded between May and September 2022 in Fagaglia, IT.
Field recordings come from here and surrounding areas.
Additional home recordings by Mike Horn and Tommaso Rolando.
Mixed by Davide Cedolin.
Artwork and pictures by Davide Cedolin.
Layout by Island House Recordings.
Thanks to Mythos, Tim McManus, Tommaso Rolando, Mike Horn, Giacomo Bozzo, Luigi Bozzo, Timo Cedolin, Caterina Rolando, Simone Mattiolo, Paolo Tortora, Daniel Bachman, Mattia Solaroli, Maurizio Gusmerini, Matteo Casari, Cameron Knowler, Eli Winter, Buck Curran, Michele Delucis, Mike Sill, Lucy Adlington, Jeff Tobias, Raindogs House, Keirstine Necole, Stefan Beck, Francesca Goglino, Mattia Meirana, Vasco Viviani, Emiliano Russo, Daniele Torcellini, Nicholas David Altea, Lara Bennett, Stef Barchi, Stefano Chiantera, Keith Hadad, Sebastian Bischoff and all the people supporting my work.
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