Acoustic Guitar Scene & Acoustic Guitar Festival (CD)

Release Date: 06/03/22

Two samplers of Germany's Acoustic Guitar Scene from the late 1970's, produced by 'Krautrock-Guru' Conny Plank.

'Acoustic Guitar Festival' is nothing more, but also nothing less, than a momentary stocktaking of the guitar scene in Germany. Any attempt to give a complete overview of the guitar as an instrument would be doomed to failure from the outset due to the sheer infinite variety of guitar styles and forms of playing. If one takes up Beethoven's words, 'The guitar is an orchestra in miniature', one soon realizes that the timbres, the polyphonic structures of the guitar are just as manifold as the individual instruments of an orchestra.

I have deliberately chosen the term 'festival' for this production for several reasons. At a festival, well known musicians, newcomers, soloists, groups, virtuosos and those on their way to become so, come together to enjoy a few days of the joy of music, of the instrument, of making music and listening together. The familiar alternates with the new, the unprecedented, new currents emerge, are processed and one is consciously or unconsciously influenced by colleagues or carried away to spontaneous improvisation or variation.

This is how almost all the titles were newly created for 'Acoustic Guitar Festival'. Well-known names provide the framework, but - and this is what I consider far more important - the most space has been given to performers who are already proving today that they will be outstanding representatives of the guitar tomorrow. Each in their own style and in front of their own audience.

Many of these newcomers, whose music may well establish a new trend, can be heard here for the first time, and I am sure that this document of contemporary guitar playing in Germany shows its eminently important excerpt, an excerpt that reveals how unique the guitar, this instrument with which we all live, is in its diversity of artistic expression.'

(Original excerpt from the 'record sheet' of the first vinyl edition from 1975 by Manolo Lohnes, born 12th December 1943 in Freiburg/Breisgau, German flamenco guitarist)

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