(08.05.06) It’s easy to decry the pointlessness of a corporate mainstream that
make anything that hasn’t had all of its emotional value fabricated,
focus group tested and packaged in a way to maximize corporate profit.
The radio conglomerates and music industry behemoths aren’t really
interested in offering you a record that you can wrap yourself in and
find real comfort. Such solace implies satisfaction and truly
satisfied customers stop coming back, stop needing their next pop
candy fix. Satisfaction is the bane of the mainstream and like
junkies, perverts and revolutionaries we must travel into the fringes
(like, say, the Internet! Gasp!) where we can make immediate and
direct contact with musicians seeking to work in a world free of snake
oil salesmen, corporate hucksters and whoring middlemen. Where we can
find folk like Fabio Fonda, whose self-released Schema is a
record that is tender and fragile that it would be destroyed by the
ugly meddling hands of the industry juggernaut. Schema has to
be found in the wild because that is the only place such warm and
organic innocence can still grow.
Floating over the post-rock landscape like a haze of airborne petals,
Schema is filled with guitar-based melodies, though Fonda has
little apprehension about bending his guitar and turning it into a
atmosphere generator (ala Robert Fripp and Robin Guthrie). “Broken”
swells like ocean waves, shining tones that are rolled over the
listener as a rhythm section does a little shuffle-start; “Out of
State” flexes like bent sunlight as malleable tones are pulled and
stretched across a steam-driven beat. “Paradigm” reminds me of
Fripp’s soundscapes, though Fonda doesn’t have the same infinite
horizon in mind; his focus is more on the shore, on the arriving waves
and how they beat and recede against the sand, whereas Fripp gets lost
out in the endless undulating ocean.
“Toss,” one of my favourites, might be something found on a Dick Dale
record if the surf legend had shown any interest in Brian Eno and
Portishead. Fonda builds from delicate beginnings into a
reverberating conflux of sound where electronics squiggle against
aquatic guitar trilling. The layers of “Karm” evoke lazy afternoons
at a street side cafe in Madrid, lying at the edge of the surf on a
Mediterranean beach, and idly watching tiny white seedpods rise up
from a meadow of blooming flowers.
Schema beguiles the listener with a sort of generative bliss,
whose tracks are so organically inviting that your brain finds all
manner of ways in which to unravel under the spell of Fonda’s
solar-charged, liquid guitar. This record is a sunflower in the
fields of corporate weeds, an unexpected stalk that is a thrill to
discover.
Schema is out now and available directly from the artist at the
website.
