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Best of 2020

Alessandra Novaga

I Should Have Been a Gardener (LP)

Label: Die Schachtel

Format: LP

Genre: Experimental

Out of stock

Much needed repress! Offering a visionary approach to the solo guitar, Milanese experimentalist Alessandra Novaga, delivers an expansive meditation on the late filmmaker, Derek Jarman.

**Edition of 200, yellow vinyl, 180 gr. heavyweight LP + extensive booklet** I Should Have Been a Gardener is the last solo Alessandra Novaga’s album. The main inspiration is Derek Jarman, his diaries, his garden, his life: it is a portrait of the man, inspired by the life, the death, the political commitment, and the garden, a fresco composed of the music that Jarman loved and listened to. Sound and silence work together, music seeks redemption and purification in a living and sick atmosphere at the same time, like his garden at Prospect Cottage, a magical place, where colorful flowers that bloom between the stones, and crosses built by rusty irons left on the beach by the sea, coexist between the sea and a nuclear power plant.

Emerging as an ethereal aural portrait of the man, sound - interventions of tonality with non-instrumental sources - and silence join in a single, unified body that seeks redemption and purification at the boundaries of life; an imprint that, like Jarman’s garden at Prospect Cottage, is magical - flowers blooming between the stones - hovering in the stark space between an endless sea and post-modern shadow of a nuclear power plant.

As remarkably listenable as it is challenging and pregnant with ideas, Novaga’s I Should Have Been a Gardener represents a strikingly at ease step forward in the potentialities of experimental music.

Bravely taking on the ubiquitous expectations of the guitar, Novaga refused to relinquish the clarity of source and sound, forcing the ear to rethink what is accepted and known at every turn.

An immersive journey from one of Italy's most important contemporary voices, I Should Have Been a Gardener is available from Die Schachtel in a very limited Edition of 200 copies on 180 gr. heavyweight, yellow vinyl, accompanied by an extensive, exploratory booklet.

Details
Cat. number: DSZEIT16
Year: 2020
In the “oblique” portrait that Alessandra Novaga dedicates to director Derek Jarman there’s the implicit assumption that even behind the most eccentric artistic minds lies a private life dotted with small things, gestures of daily care that have no place in the works meant for the public. A dimension where the visionary flair gives way to quiet solitudes and, often, to an irrepressible melancholy.

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