Estación Edén: Guitar Works from Uruguay II

While tango jostles with rock nacional and popular dance rhythms like cumbia in Montevideo and Buenos Aires, once you escape to the Pampas the music is older, calmer and less prone to change. In his meditative, exquisitely refined guitar playing Gustavo Pazos Conde investigates the roots of the country forms that provide the deep, fertile soil from which much southern South American music has grown. As well as his own compositions, he includes on this, his second album, pieces such as ‘Delirio’ by the past master Peruvian Mariano Melgar (1790-1815), an exponent of the yaraví, which was believed to be one of the primary sources of gaucho folk music. It's a soulful number.

These songs evoke the wide-open horizons of the countryside and the mellower seasons. While always in a melancholy, minor-key mood, Pazos Conde takes full ownership of time-honoured genres like the vidalita and estilo and injects them with a positive energy. A beautifully produced, profoundly poetic album.