Album Review: What If? by Luca Stricagnoli

Luca Stricagnoli is a guitar prodigy, standing out even in an era rife with “guitar prodigies”.

His playing is creative, fun, warm, and precise. His song selections are diverse, combining personal compositions with popular covers. And his style is varied, showing mastery across many techniques.

Many great fingerstyle players can play accurately, many can even play with feeling and sensitivity, but it’s wonderful to listen to a player who can also weave in that spark of fun and creativity that makes you forget you’re listening specifically to guitar, but rather just to good music.

On “What if?”, Stricagnoli colors outside the lines of a typical fingerstyle guitarists by incorporating multiple guitars on several tracks, in addition to using other instruments when neccessary (see comment about a “kitchen knife” below!).

What If? by Luca Stricagnoli

Artist website | Released: 2017 | on CandyRat Records

ALBUM DESCRIPTION:

‘What if?’ is a question that symbolizes the imagination, the curiosity towards a new idea but also the courage of abandoning your comfort zone, the push of trying something different from what you already know, the will of going in a different direction. This is what I have tried to do on a musical and on a personal level with this album.

‘What if?’ contains 4 originals, 6 arrangements and a multitude of playing techniques.

“The common element that ties all of these pieces together is a period of my life spent searching for new ways to approach the guitar. Sometimes this research brought me to play 5 guitars and a kitchen knife in the same piece, some other times it led me to go back to the roots and be perfectly happy with it: using just 1 guitar, without any effort of putting some technical innovations in the piece. “

“I see the arrangements as a way to invent new technical solutions: they are a way not to bend the music to the technique (which could happen in the process of composition of originals, when you could decide how the melody goes based on what’s comfortable) but to put the technique at the service of the music instead. The originals, on the other hand, are meant to tell my own stories.”