Kastning-Szabo: new album

 

I first began working with virtuoso Hungarian guitarist Sandor Szabo back in 2006.   In that time, we've performed concerts together; both in the US and on European tours.  We've done live on-air radio performances for NPR in New York City.  Some of the concerts from our European tours were filmed for Magyar Televízió (Hungarian National Television).

We've recorded over a dozen albums together, and continue to work on more.

The current recording project is an acoustic duo album.  That format has been our primary focus over the years, and even though we've released an album almost every year, we've not done acoustic duo recording sessions since 2015.  In the interim, we've focused on albums in the Ethereal series, which involves me on my guitar-family instruments or piano, and Sandor on electric guitars, processing, Asian stringed instruments, and orchestrations.  A few of the Ethereal albums have also included percussion artist Balazs Major.  As much as I loved everything we've done and are doing, I really missed our acoustic duo work.

Recording session; Vac, Hungary; 2012.

The recording sessions for our new acoustic duo album project began in late 2024. Those recording sessions wrapped up in July 2025.  From the recorded material, we've selected 10 pieces for this album.

For the album title and track titles, I've written a 10-line poem.   Each composition is titled using one line of the poem.  The album title is the title of the poem, and is as follows.

To capture the light

Turn the day
From that in water
Flows over and between
A universal forever
That grows forth
In illumination frozen
At dawn and twelve
The slowly hazes
And carries outward
Within light capturing 
 

The 2025 acoustic duo material is an evolution of our acoustic duo path and direction.  I'm using instruments on this project that didn't exist in 2015; this fact partially contributed to the evolutionary directions.  The instrumentation for this project is:

• Kevin Kastning:  17-string Sub-contraguitar, 18-string Contraguitar, 30-string Contra-Baritone guitar, 30-string Double Contraguitar, 24-string Double Sub-contraguitar
• Sandor Szabo: 16-string Classical guitar, 6-string Classical guitar 

That's a very different palette than any of our previous projects.  Not only has this instrumentation helped create a trajectory for this project, it's beginning to establish the concept of next year's acoustic duo recording project.  Which again will be on a different evolutionary path than the 2025 project.  

As with all my projects with Sandor, I'm looking forward to it.

-kk