Sometimes records reflect life with an unsettling precision, your own breath sticking to a mirror, confounding or transforming reality. J.H. Guraj, real name Dominique Vaccaro, is back with ‘The Flip Side’, an accomplished work of grace and sprawling elegance documenting struggle and a near-death experience that summons ghosts of Western primitive masters, rollicking free folk, minimalist orchestrations, weeping guitars and smooth psychedelics.
Time stopped for J.H. Guraj in 2021 following a brush with mortality, extensive forced recovery and subsequent hints of depression after an almost fatal bike crash, leaving our wandering soul, once again, at the edges. While his previous record ‘Introspection / Migration’ hinted at Middle-Eastern influences and merged the artists’ Arbëreshë upbringing with stoic ecstasis, free-form structures and guitar wizardry under sepia tone curtains, ‘The Flip Side’ twists, turns, falls down and rises to new heights, the widescreen breadth of Dominique Vaccaro’s cinematic vision projects new colours, a stark contrast of pastoral emerald green and pitch black asphalt, urban decay and mercurial mystery.
Like passages from some archaic songbook what astonishes is how detailed the new compositions are, a warm embrace like ‘Way To Long Goodbye’, counterpoint pianos leading the way down a Gershwin avenue; ‘You Got It All Wrong So Did I’ with its Van Dyke Parks arrangement; the 9 minute epic ‘Us As Ghosts’ a haunting ballad that resolves into kosmische landscapes; the muted symphony of ‘Fake Af’ and the spectral disorientation of ‘Nothing I Can Do But Flow’. Gentle drumming from collaborator Gianluca Panici augment the eeriness of ‘The Flip Side’, motions that create a sense of suspension and yearning. Vaccaro’s long standing career in electroacoustic music informs the record directly with a rich textural approach that blends looping, tape manipulation and electronic synthesis creating the perfect backdrop for his acoustic and resophonic guitars.
J.H. Guraj’s musical realm bridges avant-garde, harmonic song-styling, silky piano-guitar interplay, musique concrète, abstract restraint and modern chamber music. A world where Charles Ives, Dirty Three, Branko Mataja, Dead Moon and Loren Connors collide. J.H. Guraj might be still looking for belongingness but us listeners are already far ahead of him, we already know he resides with the greats.
“Strange stumblings of time, unexpected arrangements of tones, a voice and depth of emotion which in the history of guitar playing is exceedingly rare. This is the Post-Modern guitar.” (Bradford Bailey, The Hum)
"At under a half-hour, Introspection/Migration never threatens to outstay its welcome, but it lingers like a secret begging to be passed around." (Aquarium Drunkard)
