Rosebud Relevant is a new record label adventure that I am embarking on—much to my own surprise—with a kind of calm energy. Rosebud Relevant is aimed at documenting, at keeping track of the pages that I believe are significant within my personal artistic path.
I don’t think I used the word pages by accident. In the emotional hue that seems to animate this intention, I sense—perhaps for reasons of age—a succession of moments that are more or less determining, the shadow of a constellative parabola.
Some elements of this trajectory lie behind me, yet their projections point me toward what is still to come. I notice certain things now in my hands, as though they had only now taken a more complete shape.
It is as if the music I have made, that I make, and that I hope to continue making, had acquired deeper traits—as though inspiration, the relationship with creation, and the bond with the instrument had suddenly gained a different weight.
Rosebud Relevant aspires to be a sort of personal journal of the things I consider most relevant and revealing within this small, yet for me important, fragrance
The Lonesome Thing
Gianni Mimmo
Info
There's a feeling - one I believe many musicians know well - of finding, or perhaps recognizing, within the act of playing and studying one's instrument, an intimate and at times all-consuming space. A deep relationship with the material at hand. The ineffable mystery of certain intervals, the way a sound's color bends in a passage, those unresolved imperfections, and the licks that keep beckoning, as if they still hold something just out of reach - like a necessary certainty, or a question left unanswered.
In the quiet and solitude of those moments, I believe a voice hides - a vital whisper - that, now and then, glows with a kind of rare light.
The appearance of that flicker repays all the fatigue and boredom of repetition, all the effort spent lingering over an arpeggio, the struggle of certain articulations, the tonal distances that ask for a particular timbral grace.
So it happens that some fragments, some stubborn fixations, some repeated returns, find their way back in unexpected ways - and become fertile ground. The pieces that appear in The Lonesome Thing are, perhaps, a gathering of those.. studies, I'd say so.
They are ideas and paths that often took shape in the middle of other sonic journeys: • some were born during recordings for other projects, others in the calm of warm-ups between tour dates, others still while testing the acoustics of a venue before a concert. But I came to see them as precious vessels - "little cases of myself."
In selecting the playlist, I followed a thread - a narrative line that seemed to emerge from the contrast between contemplative and more assertive moments. Some melodies wanted to vanish and return, certain silences floated with quiet solemnity, some intervals painted the expressive intent, while echoes of dear masters and the scent of distant places revealed themselves in phrasing and form.
The Lonesome Thing owes much to the sonic fidelity and respectful dedication of Lorenzo Sempio, who oversaw the recording and balance of this work. Lorenzo holds a rare and vanishing gift: the art of listening.
Gianni Mimmo
