Daniele Gottardo

Renowned Italian composer and guitar virtuoso Daniele Gottardo’s brilliant new concept album, INkBlot, is an inventive and daring series of modern guitar chamber music that dives deep into the realms of visual art, psychology, harmony, and counterpoint. From the album’s opening flurry of impressionistic strings and subtle, textural guitar arpeggios, one is immediately drawn in like Alice chasing the White Rabbit—lured by the wafting mist of harmonic colors, driven by the music’s visceral sense of wonder and curiosity. And the world awaiting—the one so carefully spun from waking dreams into existence by Gottardo—is every bit as rich, colorful and sublime as Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland.   INkBlot is a record that contains multitudes. It is alternately sonorous and dissonant, blissful and frightening, focused and whimsical, peaceful and unsettling, at times excited to the point of restless anxiety before collapsing into hushed contentment. It is intellectual but never sacrifices its emotional gravity on the altar of the academic, and it is achingly, awe-inspiringly beautiful. The album exists at a rare vertex in space-time where Debussy’s “Claire de Lune” straps in alongside Stravinsky’s Firebird on an interstellar spacecraft bound for star systems unknown.