Piers Faccini, ‘My Wilderness’
He’s a travelin’ man: Piers Faccini shares a journey in song on his new CD ‘My Wilderness’
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Originally Published: Tuesday, December 27 2011, 6:00 AM
Updated: Tuesday, December 27 2011, 6:00 AM
Mark Luscombe-Whyte
Piers Faccini’s ‘My Wilderness’ CD
Piers Faccini takes the role of traveler of his latest CD, ‘My Wilderness.’
- Venue: Six Degrees Records
Piers Faccini sings songs of searching. In almost every track on his new album, “My Wilderness,” he wanders and roams, traveling perilous distances in both landscape and thought. Even the album’s cover pictures a map on the singer’s face, with roads tracing his profile and cities dotting his brow.
It’s an apt image given Faccini’s music. It’s equally well-traveled.
The first four tracks on “My Wilderness” trek from the green hills of England to the forests of the Balkans to the dunes of Morocco to the swamps of the American South. But these aren’t a tourist’s snapshots. They’re a traveler’s true adventures.
As you’d expect, Faccini was reared to migrate. Born to Anglo-Italian parents, he moved with his parents to France when he was 5. He attended art school in Paris before taking off for London to establish an English-lanuage music career.
Faccini’s U.K. influence can be heard in several key elements he shares with quintessential British mood-man Nick Drake. Like Drake, Faccini sings in hushed tones and favors graceful, acoustic arpeggios. On the new album, he pairs his guitar with a cello and violin, recallng Drake’s work with arranger Robert Kirby.
Happily, the comparisons end there. Over the course of his four albums, Faccini has broadened his sound with variations from more folk cultures. “My Wilderness” not only features more than ever, it integrates them with the most ease.
Faccini employed a key player to help in that pursuit. Several tracks include work from French cellistVincent Segal, who created one of 2009’s most beautiful works, “Chamber Music,” a collaboration with Malian kora player Ballake Sissoko. Segal brings just as much sensitivity here, laying a fine line of darkness to the opening track, “No Reply.”
The song sets the album’s lyrical theme: a diaspora of the soul. Its music has an Italian rhythm, while the follow-up track, “The Beggar & The Thief,” moves further east, to the gypsy beats of the Balkans, highlighted by Ibrahim Maalouf’s nagging trumpet. It’s not long before we’re off to the slave-song lilts of “A New Morning” and the Delta blues of “Tribe,” only to later wander over to the Rai cries of Algeria.
Together, these sounds create footloose music that, ironically, couldn’t have a finer sense of place.
