Luminoso

Enrique Malo Lop, guitar

If the darkness of brief winter days is getting you down, Alexandra Gardner has proffered a cure. Luminoso, a six-minute work for guitar and samples which also lends its title to this disc of “solo with sounds” pieces, is inspired by the sunlight in Barcelona. The rhythms and timbres of flamenco-style guitar playing dominate the opening measures, but the bed of processed guitar sounds underneath pull things in a more ethereal direction. I’m not sure you’d hear the sunlight without the program-note suggestion, but the music’s movement—both in the acoustically finger picked and in the electronically crafted—generates an inherent warmth.

—MS