Vieo Abiungo

Songwriter and film composer William Ryan Fritch has added his unwavering multi-instrumental talent to a great many projects, including Sole and the Skyrider Band. Now, Fritch’s debut under his moniker, Vieo Abiungo, exists in a strange netherworld where modern classical, tribal, the experimental and film music intersect. It’s a kind of fourth world music, too complex and playful to be film music, yet too experimental, distorted and distended to be classical. It possesses a unique undercurrent that seems to stem from the percussion which initially seems to be working counter to the sweeping melodies. However like barnacles it then begins to sweep up other instrumentation which attach themselves to its wake. It can be a light footed and cheeky, sprawl out into a bawdy beautiful drunken mess of sound, whilst at other times feel tight, light and contained. This is really something quite different and spacial.
It’s bold and beautiful with a slight darkness that sits uneasily with the sheer precociousness of the man. It feels like anything can happen. His mixes are thick. Sounds reveal themselves triumphantly only to submerge again, horns, cello, turntable, synths, even subtle fragments of voice (or voices). Fritch clearly likes building order from disorder, a kind of messy hard won beauty from amongst the swirls and seemingly amorphous, near ambient wanderings. But the key is really the percussion, there’s everything from kit to what sounds like banging on soft drink cans and it offers an anchor to the music that not only prevents it from drifting away, but actually sends it a completely disparate direction.
A self-taught player of over 30 instruments and a film composer by nature, he approaches classical composition and traditional music forms not with scholarly intention, but rather with the curiosity and impulsiveness of childlike fascination. Fritch’s debut album for LTS, Blood Memory is an unfiltered and organic pastiche of enumerable musical styles and earthly utterances. It’s his love song to the deep-seated cadence of African music that pervades our most diurnal rhythms, and the enfolding swirl of sounds that we both create and occupy. Blood Memory was followed in 2011 with the Blood Memory Remixed album, featuring remixes from Manyfingers, the Boats, Part Timer, Children of the Wave, and many more.
Now Vieo Abiungo’s newest creation, And The World Is Still Yawning will be released August 30th, 2011 on 180 gram vinyl and digitally. There will also be a deluxe edition of the vinyl available with a limited handmade remix CD mastered by Nils Frahm. It will featuring remixes and collaborations from Joan Jeanrenaud (formerly of Kronos Quartet), Benoit Pioulard, Sven Kacirek, Field Rotation, Aaron Martin, Part Timer (Upward Arrows), Nils Frahm, Green Kingdom, Humble Bee, Skyphone, Sun Hammer, Cock and Swan, Need More Sources, and Tokyo Bloodworm.