Last month, Joan Arnau Pàmies announced the release of his new album Guidelines/Fonaments, and shared two enthralling singles, ‘Esperança’ and ‘Pes’. Ahead of the album’s release on April 4th through Protomaterial Records, the Catalan composer and multi-instrumentalist is teasing the album again with a new single, ‘AN + RS’. The track serves as a heartfelt tribute to Ryuichi Sakamoto, honouring his work with Alva Noto, ahead of the two-year anniversary of Sakamoto’s passing. Speaking about it, Pàmies shares:

“Their live electronics and piano duo has a very particular sound that I always found very attractive. This improvisation for electronics and piano is my attempt to reconstruct something similar, and a way to show my gratitude to the late Sakamoto, whose music I find beautiful and emotional in ways that are not cliché.”

‘AN + RS’ is offered with a video recorded live earlier this year. Watch it below.

Photo: Iolanda Sebé

Born in Catalonia, and raised in Boston and Chicago before returning to Catalonia, Joan Arnau Pàmies is a composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist with a vast and diverse work that includes live electronics, acoustic instruments, atypical forms of music notation, electroacoustic pieces, and free improvisation. His 15-year career encompasses a huge range of music; from classical and modern music to jazz, from glitch to avant-garde pop, setting himself apart as a versatile musician who eschews genre conventions in favour of cultivating his own voice through a liberating musical space.

Pàmies has announced the release of his new album Guidelines/Fonaments, a deeply personal and genre-defying record that expands his own sonic explorations and blurs the lines between solo piano music, ambient, contemporary classical music, and free improvisation. “It is an intensely personal exploration, inviting listeners into a meditative state to reflect on the synthesis of diverse sound worlds and experience yet-to-be-known aesthetic perspectives,” Pàmies reveals this insight. He continues:

“The album’s title, Guidelines/Fonaments, reflects the principles I’ve developed since returning to Catalonia—foundations for what I see as a groundbreaking evolution of my aesthetic. The bilingual title—in English and Catalan—is deeply personal, a reflection of my own life (my wife is American and my kids are dual citizens), and a metaphor meant to express how I see music: a historical product in constant struggle between past traditions and present aesthetic concerns. The pieces that form this record are my “guidelines” as well as my “foundations”: they present ideas that have been important to me for many years but also show new principles upon which to create future music.”

In his commitment to exploring his own creativity and reflecting his vision on the album, Pàmies performed, recorded, produced, mixed, and mastered Guidelines/Fonaments himself, over the course of four years, in various places.

Preceding the album release on April 4th through his own Protomaterial Records, he has shared two singles, ‘Esperança’, which means hope, featuring guest vocals from his former student Martina Perpinyà, and ‘Pes’. Of the latter, Pàmies says:

“In Catalan, “pes” means weight. I think of this as an apparently simple piece of music, similarly to the famous prelude in C Major by J.S.Bach of the Well-Tempered Clavier. The weight here refers to the importance of harmony as a grounding element of music.”

Immediately enthralling, both tracks display the boundless scope of the upcoming Guidelines/Fonaments. Take a listen below.