Juan Carmona – Alchemya by Richard Robert

Juan Carmona – Alchemya

If this work were a painting, it could be considered both a fresco and a self-portrait. It represents as much a step towards others as a look in the mirror: and in this duality is the secret behind the alchemy to which the title of the album, Juan Carmona’s tenth, refers. Bringing together private and shared concerns, open-mindedness and introspection, the flamenco guitarist has found a way to balance opposing forces and demonstrates an unparalleled sense for composition. Once again, he provides an inventive and coherent answer to the preposterous challenges of his imagination.

It must be said that Juan Carmona’s playful; run-away imagination never lets him rest and arouses in him the wildest possible desires. Alchemya confronted him with a thorny – but infinitely exciting – problem: how could he combine the love for flamenco running through his veins, his long-established attraction to the harmonic richness and the freedom of jazz, his admiration for the erudite loquacity of Latino music and his fascination with the intensity of African rhythms? To provide this sum of unknown factors with an answer, Juan Carmona followed his heart in the only way which matters to him: he chose to focus on the music itself.

Juan Carmona weaves this principle into all of his work, making his dreams of fresh horizons come true by meeting new people and sharing his music with them. On Alchemya, over thirty- five musicians and singers agreed to work with him, providing a range of human and musical sounds as subtly nuanced and comprehensive as possible: perfect for interpreting his vision of what this album should be. And this all took place under the experienced eye and ear of Paquete, who also worked as the artistic co-director of the album El Sentido del Aire in 2010. Nobody sets off to sail the seven seas without having dived deep into tradition first… Such is the philosophy which is common to all ten tracks of Alchemya and characterises those who worked on it.

At the heart of all these musical explorations, it is clear Juan Carmona is enjoying himself, and also that he is very demanding: far from piling music of different genres, styles and generations artificially on top of each other, the guitarist, master of both his phrasing and his vision, carefully brings to light all the hidden links between them, making us realise his desire to remain authentic and daring still burns brightly…

The marvels of Alchemya thus flow on from each other naturally, mixing different kinds of inspiration and taking them to a whole new level. New forms of expression come one after the other, but the performers never fall into the trap of showing off: instead, their work carries a hint of the glee a child would feel at playing the same game over and over again, as well as a dose of the slightly crazed, slightly nonsensical science of alchemists, whose boldest attempts to combine different materials turn them, as if by miracle, into something precious.

Richard Robert

Translation: Lorna Coing