Mike Tamburo - "Beating of the Rewound Son"
(The Music Fellowship 2005, MF16)
Mike Tamburo - "Beating of the Rewound Son"
(The Music Fellowship 2005, MF16)
From Aural Innovations #32 (November 2005)
On his debut solo album, Arco Flute Foundation's Mike Tamburo builds his unique sound around the acoustic guitar as he picks and strums his way through several lengthy but always nicely varying instrumental cuts. Weaving through sparse, warm pastoral passages and pulsing swells of delay effects are numerous other sounds, some electronic, some acoustic, some non-musical, as if Tamburo just picked up whatever was laying around at the time to see if it would make a noise. The electronics, in fact, are often atonal in nature (almost industrial at times, like on Adam's Fruit Temptation, the opening track), so you know we are far, far away from the light, vapid tones of more typical acoustic guitar/instrumental albums. When I say industrial, though, I don't mean driving beats. There's none of that. It's just that the electronic and other sounds are so softly buzzing, vaguely clunking, droning, and mesmerizing in nature that they allow the warm acoustic guitar to stand in stark contrast. The recording is not pristine either. It's decidedly lo-fi in nature, which works in its favor. The sounds of Tamburo's chair squeaking, his fingers rasping against the guitar strings...all of this just adds to the spacious expanse of the album. You get the feeling he recorded this in some rundown old shack filled with ancient, rusty bits of junk, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by deserted fields beneath cool, grey skies. Indeed, like that image suggests, there is a fragile and yet forlorn beauty to Beating of the Rewound Son that will haunt you long after the album has finished playing.
For more information you can visit the Mike Tamburo web site at: http://www.miketamburo.com.
Email at: gnarly_gnarl@hotmail.com.
Viisit the Music Fellowship web site at: http://www.musicfellowship.com.
Or write The Music Fellowship at: P.O. Box 9325, New Haven, CT 06533.
Reviewed by Jeff Fitzgerald