Australian maestro Plini will be hitting the UK and Europe this spring and bringing some of the hottest players in prog guitar with him.
The Spring 2023 tour, which kicks off in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, on 3 March, will see Plini joined by Jakub Zytecki, Owane and Jack Gardiner. The tour arrives on UK shores on 1 April at the Electric Ballroom, London.
The announcement comes hot on the heels of Plini’s live video for Papelillo, which was shot in June this year when he was supporting Northlane at the Enmore Theatre, in Sydney Australia.
And with Plini’s 2023 calendar fast becoming full – just the other day, he tweeted that he had just booked 56 flights to cover these dates – the omens look good that there will be a follow-up to 2020’s Impulse Voices on the way.
Likewise, Zytecki is expected to release new material, with the Kraków-based guitarist releasing the a new single, HEART, in September.
The video for which revealed Zytecki using an eight-string guitar to augment the blissed-out electronic soundscapes that are his calling card – few players are more comfortable accommodating guitar in such digital. contexts. Zytecki said HEART represents the “darker and heavier side” of his songwriting sensibility.
“I hope it makes you feel something, too,” Zytecki wrote. “All I can say for now is that the process of making this record, especially the very beginning, was one of the most blissful moments of writing music I had in years, and for that I’m incredibly grateful. I hope that the enthusiasm will be felt. Please enjoy the song while i get back to my studio and finish the rest of the record.”
With Owane and Jack Gardiner on the bill, expect no small amount of Shredemption, and indeed four players who approach the guitar from different points of view.
What can we expect from the headliner? Well, besides his Strandberg signature guitar, which equips the future-forward headless Boden profile with Suhr pickups, expect a tour de force of technically audacious picking patterns. Speaking to MusicRadar in 2020, Plini said one motif of Impulse Voices was his experimentation with different groupings.
“One thing I worked on was putting together even longer passages – ideas in sixteenth notes that last quite a while, going back and forth and up and down without being too repetitive,” he said. “Or consistent groups of four notes at a time. Instead, I tried to string together odd groups of notes so I could go for two bars with this flurry of sounds without it feeling like one pattern repeating over and over again.”
Playing around with scale shapes and note groupings was one way for guitarists to find new phrasing ideas.
“I’d do things like seven notes, then five, three or six – just going in different directions. That’s something that came from sitting and noodling for hours on end and getting comfortable jumping around scales. And it’s something I’d recommend to any guitarist looking for new phrases... take the shapes you know and apply odd numbers to them.”
See below for full dates.
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