'Fractal Guitar 3' by Stephan Thelen
The name of Stephan Thelen’s Fractal Guitar album series should already give a strong enough clue. But the fact that the instrumentalist and composer is also a mathematician is an indication that both of his professional passions inform these collections. And it’s easy for music aficionados versed in theory to rhapsodize about California-born, Switzerland-residing Thelen’s use of different meters, modes and more.
What will matter more to anyone not so technically minded is that he’s one of the seemingly increasingly common musicians whose work can be marketed as jazz but whose output makes him more genre-agnostic than publicists and playlist compilers may be able to pin down. Fractal Guitar 3, arguably the most sonically varied and dynamic of bunch thus far, makes a strong case for Thelen’s solo work finding favor among lovers of the spacey spectrum of progressive rock.
