Artist
Paolo Angeli, prepared Sardinian guitar
Programme
Anyone who has attended a Paolo Angeli solo performance—often conceived as a single, continuous act—knows they are in the presence of a Homeric musical journey. It is a voyage of departures and arrivals, where composition and improvisation weave a narrative in which moving melodies alternate with soundscapes that are post-industrial in character or intimately connected to nature.
At the heart of the concert is the prepared Sardinian guitar, a 25-string orchestra invented by Angeli some thirty years ago, equipped with hammers, propellers and multiple bridges, through which the Sardinian musician channels emotion in the service of a musicality in constant transformation. On this foundation, Angeli draws arabesques and melismatic vocal textures—an expression of Sardinia’s most ancient tradition.
The focus of his performance within the Guitarres del Museu series will be LEMA, his latest work, released on 9 May 2025. LEMA is a direct synthesis, capable of integrating the complexity of a musical thinking that knows no genre boundaries, in which Paolo Angeli unfolds thirty years of coexistence with the prepared Sardinian guitar. It tells of another Mediterranean—one not seduced by postcolonial folklorism—where a temporal texture and an energy emerge that call for post-rock thrust.
Paolo Angeli is considered one of the most outstanding innovators on the international music scene. Originally from Palau (in the far north of Sardinia), he grew up with his eyes set on the sea. Starting from the traditional instrument and thanks to a ten-year apprenticeship with master Giovanni Scanu, as well as the influence of 20th-century avant-garde visionaries, he devised the prepared Sardinian guitar, a true instrument-orchestra.
Since the mid-1990s, his music has incorporated influences from free jazz, folk noise, minimalist pop, contemporary flamenco, Arabic music and post-rock, reaching a synthesis of language that brings Sardinian tradition fully into the present.
Improvisation is the beating heart of Paolo Angeli’s thirty-year career: a material of connection and a way of developing compositional structures, but also a practice of communication among musicians from any latitude and musical culture. His journey was crowned in 2018 with a performance at New York’s Carnegie Hall, confirming him as a key figure among “innovators with roots” and charting an unprecedented path for a Mediterranean avant-garde music.
Paolo Angeli has released 13 solo albums and has contributed to more than 50 recordings. Since 2005 he has lived in Spain and regularly tours major festivals and theatres across all continents. He has improvised and collaborated with hundreds of musicians, including Pat Metheny (who has used a copy of the Paolo Angeli Guitar since 2003), Fred Frith, Iva Bittová, Hamid Drake, Evan Parker, Antonello Salis, Jon Rose and Iosonouncane, among others.