An interview with

Sean Shibe

Pandemic isolation has inspired a lot of albums of late, but this feels different, more hopeful…

I think that’s what I wanted it to be. When I was writing the notes and examining how I feel about it, there was a realisation that it’s definitely a sort of anti-meditation on loneliness, but at the same time it does encompass a little bit of it. The pandemic definitely gave me time to explore music that I might not have returned to, even longer than it took me to return to Mompou.

Why did you want to set

Mompou at the heart of this?

It took me a while to come round to Spanish music as something that I wanted to record. A lot of the repertoire is good music, but it doesn’t necessarily speak to me. Mompou is different; somehow he is a little more subdued, and what he brings to the guitar is so special. In his piano music he’s often harmonically really quite adventurous, but he’s not somebody who attempts to compress their harmonic wonder onto an instrument incapable of rendering it justice. He tones down his idiom on the guitar, and so it’s something much more modal that in a way harks back to the guitar’s ancestry.

Tell us about the look of the album, and shaving your head for the cover…

We wanted something that referenced that this is a new start – with Pentatone, the way we’ve had to work and this repertoire, which goes back to the origins of the guitar and this kind of spiritual idea. So I enjoy everything that the imagery brings to it, despite sometimes wondering if I’d gone too far!