LARS BECH PILGAARD

track-list:
Savn
K
Ek kveð
La Luz
Dancers
Varia
Dwellings
Ancestralism
11°11′N 4°17′W
Source of Life
Land of Fire, Winds of Smoke

recorded, mixed and mastered
by Peter Barnow

On August 30, 2024, Lars Bech Pilgaard has released the solo album ‘Folklórica‘ on momeatdad records.
The release was celebrated with a tour with performances across the country.
At the concerts, Lars Bech Pilgaard was accompanied by the visual designer Piotr Winievicz, who designed the concert space in a new format every night and created the framework for a sensual, intimate experience for the ears and eyes.
‘Folklórica‘ was released on double vinyl with artwork by Andreas Korsgaard.
The record has also been released digitally and is flanked by a documentary film created by Pilgaard’s long-term visual collaborator Mathias Winther Kjeldsen.
The film depicts the work with the music in the vulnerable creation process, where the string instruments are presented as soulful soulmates who tell the story.
Documentation from the studio and staging of improvisations in nature create magical bonds between the instruments, the music and the spirit.
The poetic images document a sensuality from music’s embryonic stage, where the camera’s gaze for the creative artist’s inner world becomes part of the narrative of the work.
The album falls into four chapters on the vinyl’s four sides and consists of bowed guitar, prepared guitar, banjo and electric guitar.
The music flows seamlessly between delicate bow strokes, acoustic, prepared guitars in polyrhythmic whirlwinds, primitive blues drone and ritualistic banjo serenades.
Organ-sounding ambient electric guitar and bagpipe-inspired fuzz eruptions also fill the grooves with sound.
On ‘Folklórica‘, Bech Pilgaard’s fascination and attraction to folk music is staged, which, like a vein, becomes a crossroad for the meeting between the album’s abstract expression and concrete flow, and creates an ambitious masterpiece where the potential of string instruments is transformed through dialogue with deep folk musical traditions.
The album is an archive of experienced communication between people, nature and spirituality and an investigation of the power of music as a catalyst for the common human.
As a reflection on the poetic abilities of music and folklore as a medium for new encounters between people, traditions and experiences.
Lars Bech Pilgaard has made a name for himself for a decade with his energetic and always sonically challenging guitar playing.
“Whether it’s as a sideman with Bisse, Anja Jacobsen, Marcela Lucatelli, Maria Faust, Mija Milovic or in some of Pilgaard’s own ensembles SVIN, Klimaforandringer, or Slowburn, you’re never in doubt about the guitar’s owner.”
Lars Bech PIlgaard’s music is in the borderland between noise, sacral nerve and organic improvisation, but Pilgaard’s musical expression is in its basic form changeable and he cultivates unconditional space with room for the absolutely abstract and the perversely concrete.
In December 2023, Pilgaard received two DMA jazz awards and in 2019 was nominated for a Danish Music Critics awards as musician of the year.