Gabriela

For Argentina's Gabriela, music has always been about exploration and challenging the norm. On her sixth album, Viento Rojo (Red Wind) (Intuition), she says she tried "to oppose all the internal and external noises we have to live with. Everybody's afraid of silence."

It's a record of very calm moments, such as "Hay Senales Claras" (There Are Signs) where the sound seems almost suspended in the air, borne up by a voice that swoops and glides and backing musicians, including violin, cello, and bass, and avant-garde-and-beyond guitar icon Bill Frisell, whose playing is very empathetic throughout.

"I was experimenting with samplers, and using my grandmother's crystal glasses, anything I could think of."

"I asked Bill to arrange it, and he came up with some very sensitive arrangements," she said. Add to that a very close, intimate production by Lee Townsend, as on "Noches De Kerosene," (Kerosene nights) and she's come up with a record that transcends genre, not unlike the work of Jane Siberry or Robin Holcomb.

"This record's a real step forward," observed Townsend. "The instrumentation is unusual for music of this kind, it's all string ensembles. It's a very woody, warm treatment."

Viento Rojo is the culmination of a long road for Gabriela Morrone, now 54. Starting out in Buenos Aires, played in a band then she fled her homeland and its miliary dictatorship in the ‘70s, because "if you were a rock musician at they time, they thought you were a guerilla, and you ended up in jail."

She eventually settled in Los Angeles, recording with the likes of David Lindley and Alex Acuna . But it wasn't until she returned home in 1990, to a less turbulent political climate, that things really began to change.

"I was experimenting with samplers, and using my grandmother's crystal glasses, anything I could think of," she recalled. "It wasn't that folk-ish any more. I was very influenced by people like David Sylvian and the Blue Nile."

The resultant record, Altas Planicies, stood well outside the mainstream of both pop and folk, but "what I was doing didn't fit into what was happening musically in Argentina."

She'd actually planned on making one more album, then quitting music to "become a writer or a comedian or something," when she wrote lyrics for a Frisell tune, "Rambler," and sent them to him.

"He loved them and contacted me. One thing led to another and we recorded Detras del Sol, whose personnel included Frisell and Eyvind Kang on violin.

"I brought the songs, but beyond that it was a totally improvised record. It was like playing with a garage band from Mars!"

The record went on to win the prestigious Deutschen Schallplattenkritik award in 1997, and be named one of the Top 10 records of the decade by Acoustic Guitar Magazine. It certainly gave Gabriela the impetus to continue with music, and move ahead to Viente Rojo.

"I wanted this to be a totally different road. I'd thought of a project without drums, a floating thing, with strings the main sound. I asked Bill to arrange it. I wanted it to be as Zen as possible. I even try to keep my lyrical images as simple as possible."

Recorded in just three days, it has a intimate, dreamlike quality, the voice and guitar filled out by the other instruments, making songs like the title track into something almost like chamber-folk.

"What's different about Gabriela's music is that it has the warmth of folk music from South America, but it has the harmonic sophistication of studied work," suggested Townsend. "So the pallette is more interesting and challenging." However, it's unlikely to make her known at home, because "my records aren't distributed in Argentina, and haven't been for a decade."

She doesn't perform there, and travels to America to make her albums. And, although Viente Rojo only appeared recently, Gabriela is already looking ahead to a new disc, yet another collaboration with Frisell.

"I'm working on the next project, which I think will happen at the end of this year," she said. I know it'll be another road, with different instrumentation, but beyond that it's still a mystery."

This article first appeared on Sonicnet.com

Gabriela

"I was experimenting with samplers, and using my grandmother's crystal glasses, anything I could think of."

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