Austin City Limits is excited to announce that we will be live streaming our upcoming Season 49 taping with Grammy-winning guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela in their first appearance in a decade, with a one-of-a-kind performance featuring the Austin Symphony Orchestra on July 7 at 8pm CT. This appearance marks the first time Austin City Limits/Austin PBS has collaborated with the Austin Symphony Orchestra, one of Austin’s oldest and most respected arts institutions. ACL offers fans worldwide the unique opportunity to watch this taping live in its entirety free here on our ACLTV YouTube Channel.
In an unprecedented performance, Rodrigo y Gabriela will be joined by over thirty musicians from the Austin Symphony Orchestra to bring to life their latest release In Between Thoughts…A New World on the ACL stage. For over two decades, the Mexico City-bred duo of Gabriela Quintero and Rodrigo Sanchez have created music that invites lasting transcendence, captivating audiences across the globe with their virtuosic and wildly inventive guitar playing. In Between Thoughts marks a sharp departure from the signature acoustic sound the acclaimed act first showcased on their 2006 self-titled studio debut, and finds the pair expanding their sound with an orchestra. Conceived during the pandemic, the duo worked remotely with Vienna-based composer Adam Ilyas Kuruc and The Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra, who ornamented their serpentine arrangements with lush strings and powerful percussion. Sparked from their study of Advaita Vedanta (a Hindu philosophy rooted in the concept of nondualism), In Between Thoughts…A New World arrives as one of Rodrigo y Gabriela’s most revelatory offerings to date: a spontaneously composed body of work primed to bring about the very expansion of consciousness that inspired its creation. As they delved further into the philosophy, the duo began channeling their sense of heightened awareness into song form. “The music just started flowing out, without any real intention,” says Rodrigo. “When we looked back we realized we’d come up with nine songs that told the story of our coming to understand the Advaita path, in the exact perfect order.” The album finds Rodrigo trading his acoustic guitar for electric, adding a mercurial new energy that’s elegantly amplified by the duo’s subtle use of analog synths, Mellotron, and other electronic instruments. Propelled by a fierce vitality hinting at their thrash-metal roots, the result is an album of relentless movement and endless fluidity, each moment charged with the pure thrill of discovery. “When the subject matter is something like spirituality or seeking meaning, that can very easily go along with music that’s calming or serene,” says Gabriela. “But we wanted to do something different — we wanted to bring a cinematic quality and a lot of action to the music, and make it feel as exciting as we find all this to be.”
Join us here on July 7 at 8 p.m. CT for Rodrigo y Gabriela featuring the Austin Symphony Orchestra; the broadcast episode will air on PBS this fall as part of our upcoming Season 49. Tune in to your local PBS station on Saturday nights for fan-favorite encore episodes of Austin City Limits; watch live on PBS, or stream anytime at PBS.org.