A new album by Efrén López and Christos Barbas is always good news, especially if it is the first one by their acoustic duet, culminating 18 years of shared musicianship and friendship. On Atlas the two musicians reconnect with the power of the acoustic duet’s sound and it’s simplicity, through a series of primarily new compositions and also melodies coming from medieval and ottoman classical traditions with a lot of space and time spent in textural and minimal improvisations. Through years of mutual interaction and shared knowledge, the duet has developed a kind of common vocabulary, a lexicon based on the musical disciplines that each of them have studied in parallel, that are juxtaposed in multiple points and combined with extensive spaces for improvisation, silence and meditation.
