SEBASTIAN BROWN - Windrose

Roman musician Daniele Mattioni, aka Sebastian Brown, taught himself to play guitar, searching for a personal, abstract style that he pours entirely into his debut, "Windrose". His stripped-back, stretched-out folk-blues pushes toward a trance somewhere between meditative and hypnotic, an effect that comes through especially in the longer pieces like "Westwards" (fourteen minutes) and "Southwards" (eleven minutes). The guitar arpeggios wander, building impalpable architectures that only occasionally settle into melody, as if the tracks marked out an inner journey of self-discovery, constructed minute by minute.

The song titles spell out the very idea of a journey through the cardinal points, starting in the West and closing in the South, a symbol of rebirth and of renewed harmony with the self and, ultimately, with the rest of humanity. It's a path of rebirth that draws on both acoustic and electric guitar to explore the different phases of life.

There's something of American folk singer-songwriting here, of rural blues, of the parched heat of desert rock, and even of the sound of Matt Elliott, though Sebastian Brown never quite reaches Elliott's bleak, despairing poetics - mainly because his path seems to draw, perhaps unconsciously, on Western Christian culture: his is a quest for salvation that leads to redemption, whereas Elliott's poetics sink into utter hopelessness.
Produced and released by Beautiful Losers, the Italian independent label run by Andrea Liuzza.

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07/08/2026