Livio Lamonea: guitar9 interview

News:
30-05-2008:
A very full interview with Livio Lamonea. Livio discusses the possibility of UK tour dates plus a break down of his recent CD, Modern.



Livio Lamonea:
1) "Jungle City": Drum 'n' bass with a jungle groove, some kind of weird, modified modal interchange. Hip changes to solo on. Every chord outlines a different scale. The challenge for me is to be able to play over the changes using different colors for every chord.

2) "I Don't Care": A mid-temp sixteenth shuffle, almost all the chords are modified dominant sevenths - lots of Lydian b7 - and there's no real guitar solo, but a weird 3/8 section where me and Gino Pisani (the drummer) kinda go in and out of the written part. I wrote this part thinking about modulation by minor thirds with no functional dominant involved. I like the conscious absence of a real resolution.

3) "(To Be) A Woman In Naples": I used a guitar synth for this one, but not for the intro. It started from a chord progression and the melody is already outlined by the chords. I like to solo over these chords, but unfortunately, I can't play it live because we're a trio and it definitely needs some harmonic support while I solo.

4) "Il Senso Della Frammentazione": The title means "the sense of fragmentation". My girlfriend used this sentence for her blog and I loved the title because it's the feeling I was having while writing this song. It starts with some wide intervals, and you may find some octave dispersion in the intro. There's a little tribute to Steve Morse's chicken pickin' in the B section. The pre-solo was written 10 years ago. The solo gives me the opportunity to improvise over lots of dominant chords. Again, I like the fact that you can't really feel the end of the progression because of its ambiguous sense of tension and resolution.

5) "Too High": Chromatic parallel major chords for the intro, parallel Lydian chords for the verse over an E pedal, A minor vamp for the solo. Some strange volume swell chords for the outro - thanks Stevie!

6) "That Warm Feeling": Oh, let's just say that the title has something to do with my girlfriend and something that should stay private! I was playing "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" by myself and all of a sudden I started playing completely different changes, so I wrote them down, choosed the right voicings and that was it. Alessandro Anzalone did a great job with the fretless bass on this one.

7) "Summer Of Love": I wrote this one in the summer while I was on holiday. Lots of suspended chords to support the melody in the A section. Gino loves to play Latin grooves so we played some of the parts with this kind of groove. I like to give the bass player and the drummer I play with complete freedom. Very few suggestions for the whole CD, so I have to say thanks to these guys for the nice job they did.


Read the full interview

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