Alguien
for two electric guitars

Work no. 171
2021

At the end of 2020, the pandemic was still very much an influence on everyone's lives. The previous piece I composed, Types of Equality, was a very bleak outlook on life which – to my eyes at least – seemed to reduce every type of human relationships to the same meaningless noise. There were many types of relationships and "equalities" in the piece, but it sounded incredibly uniform; I ended up making a piano version of it by randomizing the pitches, and it still sounded like itself, no matter which notes were there – it seemed that as long as the rhythms are there, it doesn't matter which notes, melodies, or harmonies you write. Maybe not even the rhythms matter, I thought.

The pandemic obliterated whatever plans I had for the future, and I felt like I was at the end of my rope at the time. Alguien reflects that quite clearly, at least to my ears. The details of the piece's concept and the origin of the title (which is Spanish for "someone") are too personal to share them here. Suffice it to say that distorted guitar player overwhelms the clean guitar player more and more with each passing section, until the latter starts using harmonics, vanquishing the former – but perhaps not entirely winning.

This piece marked a return to one of my favorite ensembles – two electric guitars – which I previously used for Sin aliento (and this is one reason why the title of this one is also in Spanish). Alguien began a trilogy of like-minded pieces for two electric guitars. The next one, composed immediately after this work, was Let Fade Completely.