Recently, while dabbling in the world of wine reviews, I’ve been ruminating on a term that I believe would be well-adapted for use in the music criticism realm: QPR. “QPR”, or quality-to-price-ratio, is a term used by wine aficionados to denote how much bang for your buck inexpensive wines can provide. While it’s awfully rich to lay down hundreds of dollars on a first growth Bordeaux, the thrill of the hunt comes from finding cheap heat that punches way above its price range. It’s in that “there” that you’d usually find wines or selections that have unique characteristics you wouldn’t see in the more known quantity. In many ways, my namesake, Jesús Auñon’s 13 Cuerdas shares these characteristics of those quaffable finds.
Released in 1992 on the pioneering Madrileño ambient label El Cometa De Madrid, 13 Cuerdas existed for as long as that label would cease to exist. In the span of a year, whatever promising (or promise) its rich compositions might hold for its author’s future, were lost to time as copies were poorly distributed and the label disappeared from its parent company’s march towards more mainstream fare. Copies were sold off in cut out bins and found languishing as promos in universities and radio stations. Of course, “it didn’t have to be that way”, a phrase I keep saying to myself to reconcile my need to share it with you.
Jesús Auñon began developing his technique in his native Andalucia. Of that generation born growing up and influenced by “third-stream” jazz, some of his earliest musical influences were musicians like Michael Hedges, Preston Reed, and Catalan guitarist Max Suñé. And as comes with the territory staked by other guitarists like Stanley Jordan, Egberto Gismonti, as well as the late Eddie Van Halen, simply strumming along and/or using five of only six chords, was limiting. Jesús Auñon was signed to El Cometa De Madrid on the strength of his revelatory music that used finger-tapping as a means to stretch out creatively.
If you’ve ever held a guitar, tapping is something that you can easily understand. Rather than pluck a string with your picking hand, you move it up the neck, right next to the fretboard. As you chord with the chording hand you can strike from the with your other hand whatever strings, in whatever fret, you want to play. Likewise, you can have the “chording” hand move independently from the “picking” hand and use all ten fingers to play all sorts of musical intervals freely. In a way, you’re mimicking the reach and agility available to a keyboard player, on a guitar. It’s this technique that leftfield musical inventors like Emmett Chapman would exploit to create instruments like his namesake “Stick” allowing one guitarist to play the role of bass, rhythm, and lead, in one instrument.
13 Cuerdas is fascinating because it takes a certain niche, one would say superfluous, belabored, or overly technical musical idea, and tries to marry it with the more understated, meditative house sound of a label more known for its ambient minimalism. Most of this work by Jesús Auñon would largely be recorded solo with no overdubs or accompaniment, letting the pure sound of whatever guitar he chose to apply the tapping technique to. The beauty, or appeal of this work, lies in those bits when he invites others like Luis Delgado, Javier Bergia, and Luis Paniagua, (all one time/sometime members of Finis Africae) to work their signature sound into his portraiture. Grabbing ideas from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and of Anglo-descent, Jesús creates songs that make one wonder just how large the breath of tone one simply recorded guitar can take.
Songs like opener “Dulcimer” with its roots in Appalachia give you a taste of that guitar as a full orchestral instrument, jumping through octave ranges, flowing through mixed time signatures, landing in gorgeous autumnal nostalgia. Other solo tracks like “Trabalenguas” mimic the altered state of time-shifting studio effects by altering the speed of his hypnotic, circular melodies. Luis Paniagua lends a wonderful “eastern” air to “Llueve En La Cuesta Alhacaba” by grazing Jesús’s graceful open-tuned electric guitar with droning, sympathetic strings of a different sort. Luis Delgado then does his bit by drawing out his magnificent electronic string machines to sway along Jesús’s chiming, bittersweet, 12-string minimalist arrangement.
Something that links all the songs is an attempt by Jesús to never let his gifted technique become entirely one-note or to let it get in between genuinely interesting compositional ideas. “Intervalos”, for example, uses pitch intervals to cycle through a genuinely “pretty” melodic solo performance. “Al Escondite” traffics its Americana-lilting arrangement through a modal jazz that’s perfectly suited for it. The guitar harmonics of “Equipaje De Arena” and its echo-laden, tonal opposite, “Anillos Concéntricos”, stretch out a tasteful idea of what such ambidextrous guitar technique can produce.
I know others might know the idea or rue the bigger names using such a style but Jesús Auñon’s 13 Cuerdas provides thirteen counterpoints to those who think such a technique and such an instrument have yielded all the fruits, coloration, and flavors they’re going to give.
So, perfect QPR candidate? I think you know where my thoughts fall on this one.