Viscera is the portrait CD of the Uruguayan-born composer Vladimir Guicheff Bogacz, whose music lives on surprise. Behind each note lie unexpected turns that open into an exuberant sea of sound. Genre boundaries are crossed on purpose or ignored altogether, so that new music meets jazz and South American folk music. Most of the recordings are first recordings.
Guicheff Bogacz was born in Montevideo in 1986 and is a composer, improviser and guitarist. He studied guitar and composition at the Escuela Universitaria de Música in Montevideo from 2006 to 2012, with Osvaldo Budón and Luis Jure among his teachers. From 2013 to 2019 he lived in Cologne, where he did postgraduate studies at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz with Johannes Schöllhorn and Brigitta Muntendorf, and he also took lessons with Brian Ferneyhough and Enno Poppe. He now teaches composition and instrumentation at the Faculty of Arts in Montevideo. Four groups perform. Ensemble Musikfabrik plays Vos, seguime, Trio Catch plays igualito, igualito, igualito, Ensemble Aventure plays encuentros casuales under Nicholas Reed, and Kollektiv3:6Koeln, which the composer co-founded in 2017, plays Heimlich. The recordings are coproductions of Deutschlandfunk and the German Music Council (one also with Ensemble Musikfabrik), and one of Südwestrundfunk. The booklet text is by Rainer Nonnenmann.
Vos, seguime, for double trio, reflects on the classical piano trio, and its expansion of the form also takes it apart. igualito, igualito, igualito is a set of three pieces on the same rhythm, in which the cello is made to sound like the guitar of the Chilean singer Violeta Parra. In encuentros casuales, for ensemble, Guicheff Bogacz draws on the music of the jazz saxophonist Eric Dolphy. Heimlich is a tour de force of almost 35 minutes. Here the composer works through the restrictions imposed by the coronavirus pandemic, turning them into a grab bag of artistic possibilities.
Nonnenmann sums up the approach: hardly anything in this music is what one would expect from a given instrumentation, genre, section or style. Existing traditions and narratives are questioned anew, turned around or dissolved. Across nearly eighty minutes the disc moves from chamber writing to large ensemble, always with the same appetite for sudden change.
CD, Wergo WER 6440 2, released in 2024 in the German Music Council's Edition Zeitgenössische Musik.
