Shapeshifter

Ryan Francesconi is, these days, bordering on being an honorary Australian. He owes his introduction to these shores – and his Australian girlfriend and collaborateur Mirabai Peart – to Joanna Newsom. It was through membership in her live crew – first as part of the Ys Street Band, touring behind her 2006 LP Ys, then as 'musical director' of 2010's triple LP Have One On Me – that Francesconi first visited as a tourist; and Peart, he met as a violinist drafted to play Have One On Me tours.

“It was massively important, and massively influential,” Francesconi says, with no understatement, of his involvement with Newsom. “It really opened up my horizons to the scope of projects I could work on.”

These days, Francesconi and Peart split time between Sydney and Portland, Oregon, playing not only in Newsom's band, but as an instrumental guitar/violin duo exploring long, shapeshifting compositions influenced by Balkan folk music. Their co-billed 2012 LP, Road To Palios, came out on Bella Union in the UK, and grew out of a 'reinvention' Francesconi staged with his first album for solo guitar, 2010's Parables.

Growing up, the guitar was Francesconi's first love; he was, confessedly, a “basic heavy-metal guitar kid” whose solo musical ambition was to be “a shredder”. But enrolling in the composition program at CalArts, he got deep into the abstract with ambient electronica. “I went pretty deep into that world, which is perhaps why I had such a strong desire to exit it,” Francesconi says.

Making ambient electronic music under the name RF, Francesconi found performing it – with the involvement of computers – “incredibly dissatisfying as an instrumentalist”.

“I enjoyed recording visceral, textural music, but performing it felt really weak,” he says. “I reached a point where I really wanted to strip any sound to just the barest of bones; to make music as simply as I could, without any tricks or overdubs. And solo guitar seemed like the simplest expression of that.”

Those 'couple of years' were, coincidentally, spent working with Newsom, arranging the songs on her mammoth triple-album, and then for the live setting. “Performing with her, we were playing completely acoustic,” Francesconi says. “It really helped me realise what I wanted to do with my own music.”

And, so, came Parables. “When I was writing that stuff I was pretty much listening only to baroque lute music,” Francesconi says, of his solo-guitar debut. “I found it so peaceful, but really technically intriguing. I was interested in that juxtaposition: that something could satisfy a compositional statement, but at the same time not be overpowering, or too much about the ego. It's really simple but also incredibly complex, and there's not much music that actually fits into that category.”

Both Parables and Road To Palios have been compared to classic solo-folk guitarists like John Fahey and Robbie Basho – and contemporary figures like James Blackshaw – but Francesconi is, contrarily, steeped in medieval composers and Turkish folk. “You can tell when a reviewer comes at it from a rock'n'roll perspective, or when an audience is more of a rock crowd,” he says. “There's a different frame-of-reference when someone is looking at you from a Joanna Newsom perspective, or whether they're looking at you from a classical, folk-music perspective, which is a little more true to what the music is.”

Ryan Francesconi & Mirabai Peart will be playing the following dates:

Thursday 7 February - The Toff In Town, Melbourne VIC