PAOLO ANGELI - Lema

From sea to land. With “Rade” Paolo Angeli had opened up the sound of his prepared Sardinian guitar to a broad, dialoguing Mediterranean. “Lema”, by contrast, is an album that narrows its focus without closing itself off: a more inward-looking work, centred on an intimate, almost private language, though still without giving up its connections and references. The title itself speaks of synthesis: in Castilian lema means “motto”, “slogan”, but also “synopsis”; in Sardinian, however, the same four letters indicate the element that holds things together, that binds and encloses. Angeli's fifteenth studio album is thus at once a mirror and a frame: a circumscribed yet free space, one that defines a personal perimeter while remaining porous.

This drive toward introspection is also fostered by the recording method: an entirely solo work, free of overdubs and loops, in constant dialogue with the new prepared Sardinian guitar – a hybrid of guitar and cello, now evolved to 25 strings thanks to a collaboration with the Micheluttis lutherie in Cremona and Andrea Orrù of Oran Guitars (Lunamatrona, southern Sardinia). An instrument-as-resource that opens up unprecedented timbral possibilities: from metallic chimes to sitar-like drones, by way of a hammer system redesigned to further expand its dynamic range. A new tool, but above all a new interlocutor: not a special effect, but a travelling companion that forces him to rethink his language and discover it anew, with dedication.

Alongside the new instrument, Angeli also explores the oldest one of all: the voice. He chooses it as a form of free expression, often close to an inner spoken voice. A use that foregrounds naturalness and rejects any pose, as though truly no one were listening – let alone judging. Across the eleven minutes of “Mavi”, the album's longest track, dedicated to his recently deceased mother, the singing is more than a funeral lament: it's a serene farewell, shot through with memories. The piece moves with a broad, shifting breath, alternating everyday, intense and contemplative passages, with the bow drawing out harmonics of poignant transparency, in a structure that always stays alive, never closed or predictable.

Elsewhere the album turns darker. “Nakba”, which evokes the Palestinian tragedy, unfolds over obsessive tolling of the bass strings, taut like death knells. It's a piece that seems imprisoned within itself, with a dark minimalism that recalls the magnetic free-folk of Hala Strana or the emotional landscapes of the murkier releases on Constellation Records. At the opposite end, “Conca Entosa” is the record's most buoyant, dynamic moment: here the new guitar reveals its full nature as a pocket orchestra, multiplying inner voices and percussion in a whirlwind of suggestions that chase one another through unstable meters and pounding rhythms.

The sun-baked “Ramadura”, meanwhile, opens into a sonic upside down made of dissonant vibrations and muted strings, which gradually blossom into a tambourine rhythm and the album's most folk-inflected melody, once again entrusted to the artist's voice. The reference to Sardinian tradition is explicit and deliberate: sa ramadura is the custom of strewing flowers along the streets during religious festivals, a gesture of fleeting beauty that here becomes a metaphor for how music can transform even the harshest noise into a carpet of colours and shapes.

"Lema" steers clear of the tourist postcard or exotic collage: it rejects contrived simplifications and tells of a living folklore, layered, wounded, woven through with interlacing and contrasts. Even the choice of lyrics – verses from Sardinian popular tradition alongside Palestinian poetry translated into Gallurese – ties into this search for a dimension that is at once intimate and permeable. A new synthesis, or rather a new field of action, for one of the most visionary and consistent artists in contemporary Italian music.

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12/07/2025