It’s Who I Am: Álvaro Domene’s New Frontier

Enid Farber

The Black Market: The Month In Metal February 29, 2024 1:19 PM By Ian Chainey

Álvaro Domene has made a home on the frontier of sound. For over a decade, one of the underground’s most creative forces has constructed compositions that sound unlike anything else, a unique amalgam of guitar-centric jazz, metal, modern classical, and electronic influences that evades easy categorization and often doesn’t sound like traditional guitar-centric music. Those lucky enough to find those solo and collaborative releases discover works that rewrite the books on the possibilities of the guitar and the genres Domene chooses to delve into. And for those few souls brave enough to stick around, it often seems like he’s rewiring multiple styles at once, flipping the off switches on tropes and cliches while patching together something new. That said, since Domene is making the music he wants to listen to, the music isn’t “experimental” in the overused music critic sense. This isn’t an experiment. No, Álvaro Domene is letting you into his home to hear Álvaro Domene.

So, given that openness, is being out on the boundary-pushing fringes of music ever lonely for Domene? “Not for me,” the multi-hyphenate guitarist, composer, improviser, sound designer, educator, and so much more writes in an email. “I’m out on the fringes of other aspects of my life, too, so I’m quite used to it.”

What I still haven’t gotten used to is the feeling that Domene’s albums inspire. His newest works, Collisions and Contradictions — released on Iluso Records, the label Domene started with drummer Michael Caratti — are fine examples of the ineffable sensations that Domene’s music evokes. The related sets are named quite literally, letting metal, jazz, and electronic elements, among other touchstones, smash together like particle beams in an accelerator. What’s produced can be quite contradictory and even disarmingly alien. Take “Fierce Universalism,” Collisions’ opener. With its body-blow beats, skittering solos, and metallic chugs, it’s like a computer trying to recover a Blotted Science song lost on a severely fragmented drive. However, unlike some self-consciously experimental releases that come off as a skunkworks produced solely for other musicians, Collisions and Contradictions have something else swimming around in the soup of the neat noises. In a sense, it’s the trademark touch of all of Domene’s releases: These songs are teeming with life, imbued with the human experience. They’re less a didactic exercise in theoretical possibilities and more like someone showing you the inner workings of their mind.

And it’s clear that, in opposition to the rep hung on a lot of prog tinkerers as inveterate noodlers, Domene has thought about this stuff pretty profoundly. “One aspect that has been augmented and furthered forward significantly in relation to previous works is the emphasis on time linearity manipulation as it relates to form,” he explained in both albums’ Bandcamp liner notes. “I often hear melodies and other musical events simultaneously happening at different tempi, range, direction, stereo location, and correlation to each other at both the micro and the macro level, resembling the self-replicating nature of fractal maths at different magnitude of perspectives. What this entails, for instance, is that the same melody might take the form of a full five-minute piece but also occur in one single instance and anything in between and also be manipulated in different ways (pitch transposition of many kinds, tempo, retrograde, granular, rhythmic displacement, and mutation, etc.) while retaining the structural codependency of all the iterations of said line and its inner cells. Melodies can become a web of decentralized musical cells that have an interdependent logic and structure.”

While considering the fractal math of it all may make you smell something burning as your brain is revved into overdrive, the high-level processes at play behind these two albums are more straightforward. “Collisions and Contradictions represent the natural evolution of the concepts documented on Rapid Influx,” Domene explains to me, namechecking his excellent 2023 release, which I’ve described elsewhere “as if Autechre commandeered Botch and forced Dave Knudson to make a jazz record.”

What has evolved, then? “The main difference is that while on Rapid Influx, I worked with guitar and drum computer at once, as one instrument, on these two, the process was altered,” Domene notes. “I recorded the guitar parts in their entirety as full takes and then recorded the drum computer afterwards. Compositionally, Collisions is quite influenced by death metal but actively avoids as many cliches as possible, and I’m not talking only about the drum computer. Instrumental roles, flexibility of time and multi-directionality of gestures, melodies, modular motivic blocks that get manipulated through the piece, are some of the compositional elements documented in it.”

Needless to say, both of these albums are, and this is a technical music term befitting Domene’s expertise, wild. They’re also not for everyone. But Domene’s dispatches from the unknown end of music will resonate with people who have made music their life, who want surprises and seek comfort in the unexplored. After all, that’s a key part of Domene’s story. And for those who vibrate on the same wavelength, they may feel like through Domene’s work, they’ve finally found a home, too.

Álvaro Domene felt the vibrations early. “When I was a child, the vibrations transmitted from the guitar itself onto my body, and later, the addition of the amplifier pushing air in the room felt soothing, really exciting, and incredibly mysterious, which made me fully committed to it and obsessed right away,” he remembers. “My brain still processes the sensory input in the same manner; however, now, as an adult with 25 years of dedication to the craft, those sensations have deepened. The connection to the instrument and sound in general feels as both an extension of my central nervous system and, without intending to be pretentious, as transcendental as the universe using my being in a state of flow as a vessel to organize sound, space, and time.”

Domene’s mother and grandfather played guitar while he was growing up in Carabanchel, a district in Madrid, Spain. He picked up the instrument and then focused on it in his teens. Alongside his budding talents that landed him in several early bands, he was developing a voracious appetite for far-reaching music. “I was driven by my own relentless curiosity and obsession with different musics and gained awareness through a combination of a friend from high school who was older than me, people from different scenes in Madrid (where I grew up and went to lots of concerts, festivals, etc.), music/guitar magazines, late night MTV (remember that? Good music on…MTV?), early online forums, etc.,” Domene recalls. “I was a sponge and wanted to hear everything that I could find, so I would always be following the serotonin trail left for me by art that shook me to my core at an emotional and intellectual level.”

The trail naturally led Domene to sponge up metal. “I never really considered myself a ‘metalhead,'” he admits, “but the music of certain metal bands was really important to me, especially growing up, and through listening and learning some of that music I acquired certain sensibilities, both abstract (attitude, risk, conviction) and material (specific techniques on the instrument, sound considerations, gear, etc.) that became a part of my musical personality and which are applied to everything that I do, whether it’s a metal derived project or not.”

While Domene may not consider himself a metalhead, he’s still cultivated an intriguing take on the style’s importance in his playing. “There are certain aspects of performing ultra-intense, loud, and highly technical music that I think is likely only achievable, as an instrumentalist, if you spend time working in metal music that features those elements,” he writes. “Incidentally, I think that’s why most ‘jazz rock’ or ‘jazz metal’ groups out there sound like cheesy ’80s fusion to me because the performers tend to be jazz musicians who are attempting to play loud and tricky material, but they, in my opinion, and for the most part, are not even remotely aware of the macro and micro strategies inherently applied in great metal and which make that music blast you in the face and punch your heart in total catharsis, like the many nuances that the picking hand of a competent metal guitarist has, for example, which can turn a flat riff into a chainsaw or freight train. All this to say that metal and punk, not as styles per se but more so as an ethos, are part of my vocabulary, so when the music requires a certain level of intensity and sonic insurrection, that part of me is pleased to come out and burn it all down. I just never think of it as, ‘Oh well, time to play some metal riffs now.’ I actually never think of this. It’s well ingrained.”

To further his studies, Domene moved to London and attended Middlesex University. While there, he gigged around the London scene. He recorded with Geoff Bartholomew’s avant-garde jazz ensemble BigRedYellowTruck and Big Sur, a jazz metal trio with saxophonist Dan Mays and drummer Chris Packham. But an album recorded back in Madrid in 2012 would put Domene on the map. Gran Masa’s self-titled album captures the quartet — Domene on guitar, Álvaro Pérez on saxophone, Sergio Mena on bass, and Michael Caratti on drums — melding free improvisation with an eclectic array of styles.

Gran Masa was also the first release on Domene and Caratti’s Iluso Records. As Domene remembers it, it was a label born out of necessity. “After [the Gran Masa album] was done, we contacted a huge list of labels and basically ended up deciding to release it ourselves through our own brand-new label, given the mediocre nature of the offers that we got. We put together a website and started working on the distribution and promotion of that release. Eleven years or so later, we are planning our 46th or so release. We are a very small label but have a loyal and supportive audience.”

That supportive audience appreciates Iluso’s statement of purpose, a simple question that helps guide its decisions. “For those not familiar with Iluso, the catalogue focuses on exploratory creative new music derived and informed mainly by the fertile traditions of jazz, avant-garde metal, free-improvisation, western contemporary classical, and electronic music,” Domene writes. “Our process always starts with the question, ‘Does this need to be out in the world?’ If we are in agreement, we will do our best to put it out.”

One of those albums that needed to be out in the world proved to be Domene’s breakout. After moving to New York in 2015, Domene, in addition to numerous other pursuits that included teaching, worked with many heavyweights in the avant-garde jazz scene. In 2018, he released his debut solo guitar album, The Compass, recorded at Menegroth, The Thousand Caves with Colin Marston. It’s a harrowing and yet strangely beautiful album, in the same way that the awe-inducing hugeness and affecting humanness of György Ligeti or Krzysztof Penderecki’s works can be beautiful.

On The Compass, Domene transforms his seven-string guitar into so many different shapes. “EMS Of Despair” sounds like a bummed-out Fredrik Thordendal letting his amplifier howl at sunset in the middle of a wide-open dusty plain. The weighty “Coulomb’s Barrier” is like if Allan Holdsworth hung out with Steeve Hurdle. “Beta Particle” has a glitchiness that could be a noise artist tinkering with a SUMAC soundcheck. Years later, it still has the bracing quality of something new. It also cemented Domene’s solo approach.

“Part of my vision for this album was the application of certain serial composition techniques in real-time, which allow me to produce and generate a whole piece spontaneously,” Domene said in a 2018 interview with El Intruso that has been translated by Google. “I practiced the process so much that when it came time to record, I closed my eyes and didn’t open them until I felt like I had enough material. It was the most organic album I’ve ever recorded to date. All the sounds of the album were generated by me in real time. People ask me and no, there’s no overdubs, it was all live.”

Is that still Domene’s process? “It is,” he answers. “It has been evolving, refining, and expanding every time I’ve made a new album but the same core process remains.”

One element that has been refined and expanded is the aforementioned “emphasis on time linearity manipulation” detailed in Collisions and Contradictions’ liner notes. Another vital component of Domene’s solo work is the “orchestral aspect,” “specifically the aim of perceived size, impact and dimension of the music as you listen to it through speakers or live.” Domene continues: “I work really hard on crafting a sound that comes across as huge as it possibly can be while retaining crystalline detail, making full use of the stereo field as much as possible, aiming for three-dimensionality in my guitar sound by creatively using several types of delays, LFOs, and mid-side processing, deep mixing, among other techniques, which contribute to a listening experience through which the audience might distinguish the width, depth, movement and height of the guitar as if it was some kind of electric and synthetic orchestra.”

Perhaps that multi-dimensionality is why The Compass was acclaimed, earning plaudits from the press and fellow guitar virtuosos such as Ben Monder. But why does Domene think that set struck a chord? “My guess is that, at the time, very few people had attempted to make that type of record at that level of consistency and focus among its moving parts. I’m talking about a live and mostly loud atmospheric metal-sounding solo distorted guitar album containing the abstraction and risk-taking of free improvisation and noise plus the harmonic and rhythmic sensibilities of jazz and modern composition, and a soundscape spontaneously established by the creative use of delays and live looping devices. There are precedents, of course, but they don’t sound nearly as monolithic, in my opinion. Colin did a phenomenal job capturing it.”

Marston and Domene would collaborate again in 2019 in Catatonic Effigy, a trio staffed by Domene on guitar, Marston on bass and synths, and Caratti on drums. The album, Putrid Tendency, closes with the bruising “Putrid Destiny,” a 10-minute workout of lurching death sludge augmented by screaming solos. Phonon, a quartet featuring Domene, Marston, guitarist Elliott Sharp, and drummer Weasel Walter, would record the similarly metal-inclined Alloy the same year, although it didn’t see a release until 2022. That album is arguably wilder, taking Catatonic Effigy’s free metal and doubling down on the freewheeling ferociousness. When Sharp and Domene’s askew shredding collides, the flying sparks ignite the top-notch rhythm section to improvise even more chaotic grooves.

While he surveyed this metallic terrain, Domene kept his musical partnership active with Álvaro Pérez for works that hewed closer to modern jazz. “We met in Madrid in 2011 right after I returned to Madrid from London, where I had spent some years studying music,” Domene recalls. “I knew I wanted to work with him the moment I heard him play at a gig where a mutual friend had brought me to meet him. After that show, we set up a session to play and connected immediately. At the end of that session, it was evident that something special had happened in that room. It was magic. You probably know what I mean by this; it’s much more rare than people think. Since then, we have been honoring, evolving, polishing, transmutating, documenting, and furthering that experience to the best of our abilities and possibilities.”

The pair have released nine albums, and seven more are on the way. One of those is the stunning Standards, which is precisely what the title implies, unifying everything Domene and Pérez are doing right now with the jazz standards of the past. “Besides being an extraordinary improviser and saxophonist,” Domene writes of Pérez, “he is also a Kung-Fu medalist, which shapes his musical choices in very interesting ways, and I am very fortunate to collaborate with him so often.”

“Musical choices executed in interesting ways” is definitely one way to describe my first brush with Domene’s solo work, 2022’s Not Arbitrary. I struggled to convey the power of that extraordinary record in a year-end wrap-up, writing that it was “like someone scratched a KK Null CD.” Yeah, that was meant to be a compliment, and yeah, I don’t think that pull quote is making it to the press sheet. Anyway, Not Arbitrary is The Compass but reshaped into total glitch miasma, closer to Mille Plateaux’s roster remixed by Merzbow than anything an avant-garde-adverse listener would call a guitar album. The accompanying PR copy on its Bandcamp page easily one-upped my feeble attempts at categorization, calling it “AI Derek Bailey meets death metal machine guitar.” That still feels like an understatement.

“The ‘AI Derek Bailey meets death metal machine guitar’ was kind of a quick joke description that I sent as a text to my friend Ed Keller (who wrote the liner notes and has also designed some of our recent and most stunning album covers) when I talked to him about the record and it was a funny oversimplification though it makes sense, so he added it to the liner notes,” Domene clarifies. “I now would take back the AI aspect of it since there are technically no machine learning models there. It was all done with a few guitar pedals.”

So, the $10,000 question is how does one decide to make that? “What pushed me in that direction was, in short, a sensorial need for contrast,” Domene explains. “I had just finished mixing and mastering the second Zodos album (duo with the great Álvaro Pérez on saxophone, and more of a contemporary classical/chamber music/avant-garde jazz project) and Torsion (the first record I made of guitar and drum computer-sampler and which had some, what for me are, some mellow and ethereal soundscapes) and immediately after I was done with them I started hearing this dry and intense sound in complete aesthetic opposition to those records, and it needed to come out. Extreme rhythmic and pitch angularity without sacrificing precision, emphasis on sonic proximity effect, momentum manipulation and deliberate fracture, and a process of robotifying my guitar sound were the ingredients that my subconscious mind put in the front of me as an itch that needed scratching. Once I managed to get the sound the way I wanted it, I recorded the album in one hour in my home studio sometime during the holiday break in December of 2021. No overdubs and very minimal editing took place. I’m quite proud of it.”

Not Arbitrary scratches a lot of my itches. I’ve listened to it tens of times because it’s like a key that unlocks a part of my soul that I don’t get to commune with often. It’s so weird to write this about an album that others will hear as noise, but the sheer fact that it exists makes me feel less alone. Somewhere in this world that seems to prioritize separation and destruction of community, resulting in an irrepressible loneliness wracking our brains and bodies that are starved for connection, there’s someone out there making music that I can relate to. The older I get, with the wrinkles of my alienating idiosyncrasies growing ever deeper, that feels more and more miraculous.

Contradictions contains one of those miracles, too. “Extinguish The Blaze” closes the album with amplifier howls floating above abstract beats. “Besides guitar picks, fingers, springs, screws, reeds, and any other small objects that I can find worth using, I have been using a cello bow for over 10 years as I love string instruments, and approximating that sonority on the electric guitar, especially when distorted, can yield really interesting results as a LOT of otherwise unused harmonics are produced that way,” Domene writes. “It had been a while since I had used it on a record, and one day, I heard myself humming what became the main melody of the piece. I started singing it and asking myself which way would be the best for me to play that melody on the guitar and honor the haunting and melancholic atmosphere that it sets. It decided itself. It was time to get the bow out.”

The outcome is a song that feels like a response to the fatigue of modernity, a scream from the depths of our psyche that spills out over the undulating but incessant forward passage of time. It inspired me to ask Domene what motivates him to keep pushing the boundaries of music and whether any fatigue is involved with fostering that kind of creative restlessness.

“I will begin by saying that, as someone who has been battling depression and anxiety for over 20 years, this music is the magic that keeps me alive, almost literally,” Domene responds. “I don’t need motivation nor inspiration to continue making music, never have, as this is not only much more than what I love and I’ve trained my mind and body to do; but also, I experience music as a constant presence and flow of ideas, always in my mind whether it’s in the front as the main process with which I’m engaging or whether it is in the back of my conscious mind, where my brain seems to continue problem-solving and coming up with new things to explore for me to transfer into sound and develop further.”

What Domene wrote next is a sentiment that beats the heart of many music obsessives. “The fact is that I do this work because I simply love it; it’s who I am, and I must do it. if I weren’t able to create, play, and document music, I would suffer such a level of emotional dysregulation that it would likely end me.”

Of course, Domene recognizes that some might read that as too dark. “On a lighter note, I also get bored of music really quickly, and I’m musically self-indulgent but hate the idea of repeating myself; so, once I document something in what I consider a satisfactory way, I move on to the next project and rarely look back.”

And yes, we soon touched on the precarious nature of being a creative in today’s culture. “The real fatigue (besides actual physical fatigue that I still deal with thanks to Long Covid) and frustration that I experience comes due to the socio-economic pressures of being forced to exist in a ruthless capitalist nation-state that doesn’t value life, human and otherwise. Under that premise, how is music and the other arts then going to be valued? I staunchly reject the notion that art is a mere market commodity and encourage everyone to reclaim its true purpose, which is to challenge, inspire, and help catalyze the necessary moral transformation of society as a whole.”

There’s plenty ahead for Domene. The Effects Of Gravity, a touring collaboration with poet David González and astrophysicist Luke Keller, has headlining shows coming up. Per the troupe’s website bio, the show “tells the story of our cosmic origins — the formation of the universe, galaxies, stars, planets, our solar system, and our planet — from both scientific and poetic perspectives.” Many Domene releases are on the docket, including an especially tantalizing team-up with the Baltimore experimental electronic sound shaper User Friendly and new project named Warning Bells with Max/MSP electronic musician Tom Law. And there’s the possibility of Domene and Caratti hosting shows and workshops in Australia next year.

In the meantime, there’s Domene’s body of work to explore, a discography that is out on the edge of music. That can be an inhospitable place, existing in the harsh vacuum of the unknown. But by Álvaro Domene being Álvaro Domene, he’s provided a refuge. His music is a home for those who need it. –Ian Chainey