Guitars Unchained has been performed in Amiens, Brussels, Gothenburg, Lisbon and Marseille…

Guitars Unchained is a work partly using sound material from an earlier piece for guitar and interactive system called SubString Bridge written in 1999 for the Swedish guitar virtuoso Mats Bergström.

The principle of Guitars Unchained, as with several other works in my series of “unplayable music,” is that all sounding material is based on the acoustic world of a musical instrument, the guitar in this case. Sometimes close to the more or less normal playing techniques of the instrument, the structure of the work allows for impossible ways of using the guitar.

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Guitars Unchained was realized in 2023-24 at the composer’s studio in Gothenburg (Sweden) and the multichannel mix was realized in June 2024 at the Métamorphoses d’Orphée studio of Musiques & Recherches in Ohain (Belgium). The piece premiered on March 13, 2024 as part of the concert Électrobelge at Espace Senghor in Brussels (Belgium). Thanks to Annette Vande Gorne. Guitars Unchained was awarded an Honorable Mention at the 15th Destellos Electroacoustic Composition Competition (Mar del Plata, Argentina, 2024).