Sean Shibe - Lost & Found

Sean Shibe's second Pentatone album Lost & Found is an ecstatic journey containing music by outsiders, mystics, visionaries, who often have more than one identity and lay claim to various artistic traditions, genres, or audiences. The repertoire ranges from Hildegard von Bingen to Olivier Messiaen, Moondog, Julius Eastman, Bill Evans, Chick Corea, Meredith Monk, Shiva Feshareki, Oliver Leith and Daniel Kidane. Stretching ten centuries, these pieces are bound together by Shibe's unique electric guitar sound and aesthetic. The first print run of this album comes with an exclusive polaroid picture of Sean at the recording sessions.

Multi-award-winning guitarist Sean Shibe brings a fresh and innovative approach to the traditional classical guitar, while also exploring contemporary music and repertoire for electric guitar. He continues his exclusive collaboration with Pentatone after his well-received label debut Camino (2021).

"The composers and pieces on this album might not immediately stand out as having very much in common; this album is less portraiture than a journey that revels in eclecticism. If an image did come to mind, it would be something like an overflowing toybox, some kind of emporium of curiosities; but what appears to be child's play portends something darker and ecstatic, particularly when rendered through the post-modern chaos of the electric guitar.

Each musical object influences the interpretation of the next: evocations of Bingen; alternate naïveté and menace of Corea; tense liquid of Leith; inherent qualities are transformed, exaggerated and - in a sense - modernised. And yet, this is still the Old World: the opening branches and songs are earthly; the hazy utopia of 'High on a Rocky Ledge' is the jangle of the band in a lazy bar; only with 'Pushing my thumb through a plate' do we begin the uneasy climb to the heavens. From this point onwards interpretation becomes necessarily more drastic - scordatura alteration in Venus and the transmogrification of Buddha.

William Blake - a radical searching for the revelatory, seen as old-fashioned in his own day - sums up this journey. The illustrations that accompany his writings disregard convention, demonstrate miraculous prescience of the Arts and Crafts movement, and present a vital auteurship of craft and philosophy exemplified in the often androgynous characters of his personal mythos. I would worry that posing him as 'the way in' might seem a little grand, but the fecundity of his influence on so many artists eases that a little. Only he reflects the strange light and celestial ambition of the works presented here."
-Sean Shibe