Jason Del Campo

History

It was in his bedroom, at the age when teenagers usually give up their dreams and become serious adults, that Jason Del Campo first discovered the guitar. Not destiny exactly but love certainly and at first sight. Then came Angus Young, John Frusciante and Bumblefoot, then Bill Frisel, Pat Metheny, Nils Frahm, Taylor Deupree...

He locked himself away, listening, imitating and dissecting the records that never left him. At École National de Music in Villeurbanne and then at the Conservatoire de Lyon, he threw himself wholeheartedly into jazz, although he came from a family of craftsmen and barely understood it. One by one, he painstakingly rehearsed the movements, sketched them, refined them... But once this formal technical training was completed, he then had to put it all aside in order to find his own way of playing. He ventured out, created groups with others, scoured the stages, the jazz clubs and also the studios. Learning the techniques of sound and production quickly became a necessity: as he had with the guitar, he jumped in feet first. Initially he did everything on computer, but eventually and inevitably, he returned to his first love: the tape recorder.

Cassette tapes represent a leap in time to Jason. They take him back to his childhood bedroom, where he would choose CDs and re-record them onto tape to prepare playlists for family holidays. When he is listening to cassette tapes he is 10 years old again, closing his eyes and imagining landscapes far beyond the four walls that surround him.

These early experiences inform how Jason conceives the sound of his guitar: at the moment when the notes are raw, he projects them into spaces that are sometimes grandiose, sometimes macroscopic. What is rarely heard becomes the defining sound, and what others may perceive as accidents are placed as the keystone of the creation. If recording music is analogous to photography, Jason Del Campo's images are minimalist close-ups: he cares deeply about the little he chooses to immortalise. To Jason, hearing the breath of the instrumentalist is as important as the chords they are playing. The music is incomplete without it.

Music

"SAGE" is Jason Del Campo's first solo EP. Although the themes that run throughout the record were born ten years ago, it took all this maturation to give birth to them fully.

The EP was recorded in five days, in a concert hall in the heart of Lyon that was closed due to COVID restrictions. This snapshot of time needed to be taken in a real place; we had to hear the cars passing in the distance, we had to hear Jason close a chapter of the book that inspires him so much, ("L'Usage du vide" by Romain Graziani), and play an arpeggio immediately. It was necessary to vividly capture the moment exactly as it was.