"Ava Mendoza plays these songs. She makes them sing. Her technique is impeccable, but her playing is astonishingly expressive. She doesn't just bend blue notes; she wads them up into a ball and throws them up against a wall. She manipulates raw lightning, giving us a sound that is fluorescent and powerful enough to leave a trace of ozone in the air. Mendoza knows what she does better than almost anyone else on the planet, which is tell stories with her guitar.

New Spells features solo guitar music by Mendoza and by three friends and collaborators who wrote music for her-- Trevor Dunn, Devin Hoff, and John Dikeman."-Relative Pitch/Astral Spirits

Mendoza offers:

"New Spells has been in the works for a few years, but all of the music was recorded from home during lockdown 2021 by yours truly. It represents the end of an era and the start of a new one. Many pandemics have been a catalyst for change; they've made people move on from the past and imagine things differently. These are spells, hopes and prayers delivered at a gateway between worlds, to say goodbye to one and welcome the next. Their intent is to help set down some of our prejudice and greed as we move into a new world.

As someone who plays often as a sidewoman, I love interpreting other people's music. Playing solo is one of my chances to play my own writing, which I also love of course. But sometimes I miss interaction, I miss arranging and interpreting other folks' writing. I decided to involve other folks in my solo work, to do a record that was partly my own music, and part music by friends whose work I love. I wanted to interpret the other composers' work in as personal a way as I could, so that the idea of "whose" it was became a question as much as possible. I guess I thought of it as a way of making community music, even though it's a solo record.

The album cover shows me against a background of barbed wire and prickly pear cactus-- a reference to the southwestern US and the Mexico-US border. Having lived many years around southern California and in Santa Fe, New Mexico, this area and its beautiful deserts are near and dear to me. A huge portion of the country's Native American reservations are in the southwest, their borders marked by fences and barriers. The national border itself is the site of many generations of struggle and death, and of ongoing violence against immigrants, including indefinite detention and forced separation of children from their parents.

Prickly pear cactus (many species in the Opuntia genus), has grown in the region naturally for thousands of years. It's a big part of traditional Mexican and Native American cuisine and medicine. Both the fruit and the pads are delicious (despined!). The cactus grows where it wants and doesn't operate according to artificial borders. On the cover, wild prickly pear grows high and overruns the barbed wire border behind it. This music is devoted to that spirit."

This album has been reviewed on our magazine:


The Squid's Ear!