Anton Toorell

Anton Toorell’s second solo album, the programmatically titled Solos II, offers an intensification of the rich six-string poetics of his debut, 2022’s Solos. With Solos II, the Swedish guitarist, composer and producer expands on his achievements from half a decade ago, perhaps counterintuitively by focusing in on aspects of his relationship with the guitar, in both playing and tuning. The result is three tracks of cascading tonality that feel rigorous, but are performed with a light touch, unassumingly, any conceptual gambits never overshadowing the lustrous sounds Toorell coaxes from two guitars.

Toorell’s approach to his instrument - or instruments - here makes the most of both the guitar’s potential for clashing, silvery texturality, and of his own physicality. The technique he explores across ‘Volta’, ‘Cripta’ and ‘Scala’ involves playing two guitars at the same time: as Toorell explains, “the left hand is on the fretboard playing hammer on, pull off techniques, and the right hand is on the guitar in the lap playing mostly open strings.” Part of the magic here, though, is that this never feels showy or busy - the technique is in service to Toorell’s compositional mind and improvising capabilities.

There’s potential plenty here for unplanned resonance and happy accidents, though the material on Solos II is also sturdy, clearly outlined, and beautifully poised. ‘Volta’ shimmers and eddies, seemingly endlessly, its expansive seventeen minutes an unrelenting flow of shivering strings, as though the listener’s blissfully adrift on crystal spires, the notes falling into the ears like a million tiny stalactites. Its repeated oscillations around a small child’s clutch of tones are always compelling, with Toorell coaxing minute variations from the guitars.

‘Cripta’ spirals and cycles beautifully: this will seem curious, but it feels, somehow, like an acoustic take on the hallucinatory guitar loops of early Seefeel, or the spinning-top, mirroring hypnotism of Terry Riley. With the closing, becalmed ‘Scala’, the room is most present, and indeed, throughout Solos II the recording space of Palazzo Stabile in Piemonte, Italy, is both a guiding presence, and Toorell’s third instrument: “I was working in a 16th century wine cellar, a room with intriguing reverberant acoustic character. The process centred around tuning the guitars in that room, trying to find tunings that ‘opened up’ the space.”