Spanish artist Victor Herrero dusts the cobwebs off his old computer hard drives and rekindles himself with a series of unreleased solo recordings, self-recorded over 2015-2018. The cherry-picked selection of tracks offers an exquisite corpse of past moments in time, recollected and reordained to reflect the awkward present under covid-19 lockdown. In it, the strings of his nylon string guitar gently weave mellow melodic refrains in a rough and ready aesthetic. Little movements, laments and circling dances are given time and space to grow, allowing his songs to sing from the ground upwards and seep into oneiric states.
Victor is a DIY troubadour, conjuring the ghosts of Spanish guitar maestros Francisco Tárrega and Fernando Sor and the haunting of times past. As we listen to this we can imagine him sitting on the edge of our sofa in dim candlelight, whisky in hand at 4am, with the sunrise slowly peeking its head above the horizon. A really special collection.
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Victor Herrero was introduced to music in his childhood while living in the famous monastery Franco erected in a mountain valley west of Madrid (El Valle de los Caídos). There he learned to sing Gregorian and Mozarabic chant under the guidance of Benedictine monks. As a teenager back in his hometown Toledo he formed a psych-rock outfit called ‘Cicely’, which grew into a popular Madrid-based band. The group lasted 8 years, after which Victor recorded and released an album of his solo piano compositions "Connotaciones para Piano" (Sello Autor - SGAE, 2006) under his old stage name “Victor Cicely”.
Shortly after this period, Victor met his wife the US artist Josephine Foster, and they began to collaborate and perform together in concert as well as in the recording studio. During the last couple years Victor has been involved in many different projects and journeys. Travelling, recording or playing with artists like Michael Gira, Keiji Haino, Luzmila Carpio, Baby Dee, Master Musicians of Joujouka, Vinicio Capossela, Sonny Simmons, Ed Askew, Arlt, Marisa Terzi, Alasdair Roberts, Eric Chenaux, Tomi Simatupang, Alex Neilson, Paz Lenchantin, Gyda Valtysdottir, Abdellah el Gourd, Michael Zerang, Nat Baldwin, Lorena Álvarez, Shahzad Ismaily, etc.
Currently, in this year 2020 he begins to collaborate with El Volcán Música in the release of his next album, which will be titled “Hermana”. This is an album produced by Tobias Levin at Electric Avenue Studio, Hamburg, with the art and cover by Nick Devereux.
