Seaorm: Exploring the boundaries between progressive rock, experimental music, free improvisation, jazz or ethnic.

Seaorm - Forgotten Shrines

Ulf Backstrøm 2022-04-07

The album Forgotten Shrines consist of only three sons but they are long song and even an epis song at more than 20 minutes entitled Forgotten Shrines. The label behind this release is OctoberXart Records which is a new acquaintance to me.

Seaorm is the brainchild of Ángel Ontalva .

Ángel Ontalva is a guitarist and composer with an extended trajectory in creative music, exploring the boundaries between progressive rock, experimental music, free improvisation, jazz or ethnic music, with an idiosyncratic language developed through decades of interaction with different musical traditions and endless collaborations with musicians from all cultural and geographical background.

He is also a painter and illustrator with a long career in visual arts in parallel with music.

Ángel Ontalva is better known for being the leader of the avant-progressive band October Equus, with seven released albums. Besides, he has released a trilogy of albums as a soloist (Mundo Flotante, Tierra Quemada and Angel On A tower) and he has released several albums with the space-prog russian band Vespero (Carta Marina, Sada and Olkhon, the first album of the power trio Seaorm with Vespero’s rhythm section) and he has created a plethora of international projects, some of them documented in the Russian Series of octoberXart Records, of which Ángel is the founder.

As a solo guitarist he uses to play his own compositions in an open way with wide space for improvisation, making of each concert an unique experience, always different, often using alternative tunings and extended or unusual techniques for to construct different ambiences and textures, always exploratory but putting emphasis on melody.

With October Equus, Ángel has participated at the more important european festivals dedicated to progressive rock and creative musics: Rock In Opposition Festival in France, Gouveia Art Rock Festival in Portugal, Freakshow and Zappanale in Germany, MamFest in Madrid or AltrOck Festival in Milan are a few of them. As a soloist, with other projects or collaborating with improvisers, performers or dance groups he played in Portugal, Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, Romania, Finland and specially in Russia, where he did around 300 concerts in the last five years, in all its geography from St Petersburg to Vladivostok, twice as a member of the prestigious MuzEnergo Tour with a team of international artists and on his solo travels playing live and collaborating with dozens of russian artists of different styles. In October 2018 he organized the 1st octoberXart Records Festival at the legendary DOM of Moscow.

Formerly a draughtsman and painter, Ángel worked long time as a freelance animator and illustrator in parallel with music. At some point he decided to focus totally to music and stop his professional activity in the visual field. Years after his retirement, he was offered to make an exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod in 2017. He took this occasion as a comeback and since then he did seven exhibitions in Russia, in wonderful places as for example the Theatre of Opera and Ballet or the Khlebnikov Museum in Astrakhan.

Tracklist:

1. Forgotten Shrines (20:02)