Leandro Barzabal kindly sent us one of the last cassette copies of Worst Guitar Playing (VICE DE FORME VF13), a 2022 release limited to 50 copies which is long sold out, in response to my enthused burbling about his Bris De Clôture cassette, on which he produced hearty mangled noise from the guts of a synth.
Barzabal is a friendly Argentinean living in Paris just now, and we had a brief meeting in Camden Town in May 2023 when he was playing at Cafe Oto in London. I learned that he’s an open-minded fellow with a healthy curiosity about everything, and he’s made his way by simply meeting people and talking to them – at venues, gigs, any kind of milieu where new and experimental music is being practised. He takes a genuine interest in the music and ideas of others. Yet he evidently remains very true to his own singular vision of what performed music ought to be, as can be heard on this mad cassette. As the notes have it, he “works on the rupture of the instrument”, which is putting it mildly; it’s as though he’s trying to take the instrument to pieces and put it back together again, all the time while he’s still playing it and producing music. I would liken this to the actions of a crazed surgeon, who expects to play a game of chess with the very Frankenstein corpse he’s also trying to bring to life with electrical bolts (and cutting off its limbs with a hacksaw the while). A grisly image, but you get the idea.
None of this is to say that Worst Guitar Playing is like noise-rock or noise-guitar, in the way that Lee Ranaldo or K.K. Null might understand it – in fact, both of those once-radical players seem rather old-fashioned and quaint in the face of Leandro’s approach. Rather, our man has an insatiable thirst for invention – he seems determined to wring something new from the electric guitar, as if motivated by a genuine desire to give it a new voice and unleash undiscovered potential from a part of its body where no-one has previously thought to look before. At one level, you could perhaps call this naive; and there’s a refreshing untutored quality here which I do enjoy, something almost primitive about the way he approaches this most familiar and most over-used of instruments. Whether he’s already exhausted all the possibilities in the space of this one short (20-minute) tape remains to be seen, but I would like to think his investigative mind won’t be so easily defeated.
The great cover art (by Pole Ka) here may make this seem more violent than it actually is, but it deserves your lug-time. Also in the package, Leandro kindly included a flexidisk lathe-cut single Terrorgammons on the Parisian label MMLI, which he describes as “monochrome electronic music” and promises a full-length release of more such music to be released on Titania Tapes in France. Matter of fact, Monochrome Cabal Definition Monochrome Poem is already out! From 7th October 2022.