Angélica Salvi’s debut album expresses what has been gradually revealed through her work over the past years, in her collaborations and participations in different projects: she has a unique ability to communicate and to express herself freely through her instrument, the harp. Originally from Spain but based in Porto since 2011, where she teaches at the Conservatory of Music, her path includes collaborations with Evan Parker, the Casa da Música Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Modelo 62, Brokkenfabriek, Butch Morris, as well as projects developed for Sonoscopia and Balleteatro. She is currently part of the Vertixe Sonora Ensemble and leads Female Effects, a project focused on the development of acoustic and electronic works by female creators.

The title Phantone is a play on words that reveals the intentions behind Angélica Salvi’s free and genuine pieces. A game that is not really playful: the association between “pantone,” “phantom,” and “tone” consolidates the composer’s experience and ideas around improvisation, electroacoustic, and experimental music. Recorded during the Encontrarte festival in Amares, at the Monastery of Rendufe, the album searches for freedom—of sound and of how sound can inhabit a space with different layers and allusions to multiple paths.

The room allowed Angélica Salvi to work with delays, juxtapositions, echoes, and reverberations, creating elastic sounds that coexist in harmony throughout Phantone. If there is something ghostly inhabiting her music, it is the listener who finds it, through the connections of sensations each piece triggers. The “phantom” present in the seven tracks of Phantoneis very real, but less formal than one might imagine. More of an affirmation than a presence, whether in the imagined places of Salvi’s music or in the concrete effects the Monastery’s acoustics produced in her compositions. One feels the elevation of Angélica Salvi as a composer/soloist, using her harp like a magic wand that controls time, space, and the listener’s senses. Music that can be read, heard, smelled, felt, and even tasted.