FILIPE FELIZARDO

Portuguese guitar player, who in the last few years has been developing solo work of real interest, in both electric guitar as well as in electrified acoustic guitar.

Growingly departing from a notated/written premise, and somewhat moving away a bit from pure improvisation, he unfurls the craft of many a dedicated “tonalist” guitar player, which is to say that he relearns and reconfigures (part of) life through that which is modal and pentatonic. To enable that he throws himself with rigor, concentration and a sense of ritual to new ways of facing that infinite melodic and harmonic labyrinth.

He departs, more so than from any other form, from the blues, drawing in information from John Fahey, Neil Young, Keiji Haino, or from the kiwi school of Bruce Russell’s and Michael Morley’s Dead C. Fingerpicking patterns, surgical work in suspended distortions in both chord and soloist arpeggio, tone saturation mediated by his charismatic (and singular) amplifier of recent times, the heavy artillery for new human landscapes that he keeps on drawing up regularly, both onstage and on record, as much in Portugal as throughout Europe.