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Select Reviews: Wire Magazine, Joe Stannard How many times can the guitar be reinvented? Over the last half-century, musicians as diverse as Keith Rowe, Bert Jansch, Robert Fripp, Jimi Hendrix, James 'Blood' Ulmer, Sonny Sharrock, Fred Frith, Glenn Branca, Thurston Moore, Kevin Shields, Keiji Haino, and Christian Fennesz have been hailed as innovators, offering up the instrument seemingly afresh and limned with renewed potential, and in the case of Hendrix, Moore, Shields and Haino, forcing it to scream with a passion entirely in keeping with its blues heritage, confirming beyond any doubt that an experimental approach can be fruitfully combined with garage-level ferocity. And yet each step is burdened with anxiety - every time a new mutation lurches forth, were moved to wonder how close we are to exhausting the instrument altogether. According to Austin, Texas label Quiet Design, the compilers of Spectra: Guitar in the 21st Century, the endtime is still some way off, and the guitar still represents a limitless source of sonic novelty and invention, a wellspring of what they term ''unconventional sounds'. Some of the assumptions made by Quiet Design invite polite enquiry. The sleevenotes refer to the instrument's "seemingly endless possibilities when combined with technology", most likely referring to a lineage that arguably begins with Frippertronics and finds itself currently represented by drone artists such as Oren Ambarchi. But surely this is true of any sound source? It would be something of a cheat to present a compilation of 21st century guitar music where the guitars in question could just as easily be synthesizers, prepared pianos, processed field recordings or flugelhorns. Why focus on a specific instrument at all, if its characteristic properties are to be effaced? Thankfully, Spectra showcases a variety of approaches and, while it cannot by any means be considered exhaustive, its eight selections offer valuable glimpses of possible worlds. Sebastien Roux & Kim Myhr's "SIX" is a low, humming drone punctuated by cold, tentative plucks, chimes and scrapes, its initially wide open stereo picture gradually filling out to become almost claustrophobic. Further down the spiral, Mike Vernusky's "Nylah" is Isolationist Ambient, dread-filled and brooding. There's no development of mood, only a gradual intensification of the darkness at its core. Cory Allen also takes a decidedly inhospitable route, his "Fermion" slowly uncoiling its strafing, arcing sonics, its threat delivered rather than implied. Allen's track achieves an invasive physicality absent elsewhere; at high volume the track seems to surround the listener, pressing inward with increasing force, yet never quite submitting to its implosive urges. "Fermion" is probably the closest this compilation gets to the libidinous charge of rock 'n' roll, its heavily treated six-string assault located halfway between the raw power of Pan Sonic and the metallic thrum of ex-Zeni Geva guitarist KK Null. Even the lesser (or less surprising) contributions are somewhat informative: Tetuzi Akiyama's undistinguished meander isn't an especially auspicious start, but takes a delicately moribund approach; while Keith Rowe's "Fragment From A Response To Cardew's Treatise" is, despite the artist's ongoing quest to avoid repetition and familiarity, pretty much exactly what one might expect from Keith Rowe. As one of the originators of the approach taken by the majority of the artists here, he offers up an entry which is curious, compelling but essentially little more than an immaculately crafted sonic object. Abstraction has its limits - stripping the guitar down until it resembles a tool is a valid pursuit, but where can it lead but to further abstraction? Reinvention, rather than signaling increased freedom, can just as easily act as shorthand for restriction. If we remove the guitar, especially from its historical context altogether - from its part in blues, jazz, pop and rock idioms - we gain new perspective, but we also lose decades of aggregated meaning. Then again, it could of course be argued that Rowe gets his hands dirtier than most, having the nerve and expertise to reach inside the guts of the guitar and make play with its vital organs. Perhaps a more rounded, accommodating view of the guitar's potential would elicit results which juxtapose experimental rigour with unabashed accessibility, the friction arising from this meeting generating an extra layer of interest. In this vein, Erdem Helvacioglu's composition "The End Of The World" is the album's most successful piece. A shimmering idyll characterized by sussurating waves of blissful guitar, it suggests Endless Summer-period Fennesz interpreting "In A Silent Way" with additional elements recycled from on of the Beatles' greatest guitar tracks, "Dear Prudence". This composition demonstrates not only the physical but the unique emotional properties of the instrument. It's almost Byrdsian psychedelic in its tremulous evocation of an idealized Arcadian/Alantean realm - think "Mild Gardens" or "Dolphin's Smile". The flurries of arpeggiated notes recall the 12-string Rickenbacker chime of Roger McGuinn at its most beatific, or even the Jerry Garcia of "Dark Star". Darting shoals of digitally enhanced sound highlight what is all too often missing elsewhere: a meaningful dialogue with the world outside the musician's mind. Helvacioglu engages not only with technology (although it should be noted that his music is created in real time, with live electronics and effects replacing extensive post-preduction) but also with the guitar's former role as the engine of popular music. The album closes with Jandek's similarly titled "The World Stops". It's as harrowing and skeletal as anything the Texan has recorded: his guitar detuned, jarring and emotive, refreshing in this context, as it represents an attempt to explore the tonality of the instrument rather than subject it to transformation. The position of this song at the end of the album could be viewed as a reminder of some fundamental truth, that there are some dusty corners of the human soul advanced technology simply cannot illuminate. Jandek's approach is bare naked revelation, not artful disguise nor alchemical transmutation, and "The World Stops" serves as a reminder that even after all these years, this strategy is still far from obsolete.
Guitar Player Magazine, Barry Cleveland Spectra: Guitar in the 21st Century comprises experimental works by Tetuzi Akiyama (Tokyo), Sebastien Roux (Paris), Kim Myhr (Oslo), Duane Pitre (New York), Cory Allen (Austin), Erdem Helvacioglu (Istanbul), Keith Rowe, Jandek, and Mike Vernusky. Although the album opens with solo acoustic guitar (Akiyama’s “Three Small Pieces”), the compositions are generally electro-acoustic in nature, ranging from a single guitar processed through elaborate electronics (Helvacioglu’s majestic “The End of the World”) to small ensembles (Pitre’s droning “Music For Microtonal Guitars and Mallets”) to mysterious noise paintings that offer few clues as to their origin (Rowe’s “Fragment From A Response To Cardew's Treatise”). Whatever the means of production, if you are tired of the same old types of guitar tones and music, or merely curious as to what lies in the outer reaches of 6-stringdom, these intriguing and often brilliant recordings will open your eyes, your ears, and very likely your mind. Highly recommended
Newmusicbox.org, John M. McGill As a bit of enigmatic guitar music complied and released by Quiet Design, Spectra: Guitar in the 21st Century understands what a compilation should be. It does not attempt—nor should it, nor could it—to be a comprehensive overview of all guitar-based activity in the first nine years of the new century; instead, it explores the guitar as a timbral instrument, from finger-picked acoustic to synthed-out electric. Minimalistic gestures and drones abound throughout. The pieces included on the disc complement each other and often answer questions raised by the disc's other tracks (observe the contrasting paths of electronic manipulation in SIX and Fermion that proceed from similar structures of tonal repetition), yet each piece still has a considerable amount of depth on its own. The listener is conditioned for this heightened sensitivity right off the bat with the opening track, Three Small Pieces by Japanese musician Tetuzi Akiyama. The decisive rhythmic gestures are completely distinct, and mirrored by Akiyama's own breathing to the point where one must think that it, too, is a carefully considered compositional element. Austin-based composer Mike Vernusky's Nylah is a seamlessly shifting sheen, accompanied with rumblings and small percussive artifacts. Further explanation might defeat the purpose of its mellow flowing, given that the sounds are so dismantling. The shift in tone is hypnotic. The only option is to stop and stare as the textures wash over you, showing an intense command of time through larger-cycle periodic motions. It's analogous to hearing a tamed (not so jarring) lawnmower move away from you and then towards you over and over again. In Music for Microtonal Guitars and Mallets, New York City's Duane Pitre wrenches beautiful sounds from the instruments, shaping and capturing timbral delicacies—though perhaps not through delicate means. The opening section introduces a provoking pair of intervals, eclipsed by wild beating in their upper harmonic registers. It is always astonishing to remember how many interesting psychoacoustic phenomena can be accessed simply through instrument amplification. This harmonic play continues as the guitar's sound is beaten and smoothed into a steady flow of feedback and resonance. Cory Allen, another Austonian, continues down this road of sustained tone with Fermion, but he develops parallel layers that are significantly more jagged. It is not too farfetched to imagine Allen seeing the vibrating guitar string as the acoustic form of a tone generator. Set out on a table in a laboratory, it becomes the subject of careful dissections and manipulations. Sibilance is found and looped. Sustain is contorted into a tonal sequence. In reality, Allen probably was not actually so physically distanced from his guitar. He still seems to maintain a closeness with his instrument, yet his style of processing is so impressive in that it requires the composer to be a very astute listener; an observer of his own materials. Allen, through his electronics, finds the grains of guitar timbre and uses these fragments as his microelements. Jandek's The World Stops is surprisingly pleasant, given the notorious Houston artist's reputation. What may at first be heard as queasy microtonality is actually eased by Jandek's wandering vocal melodies. As his voice lilts slowly upward and downward, a psychic heaviness is created and then lifted. The vocal glissandi traverse a range of pitches in such a way that they seem to be tonally acceptable no matter the starting or ending pitch. His musical elements—cleverly haphazard tuning and defiant vocals, along with a few harmonica runs that he seems unconcerned with tactfully fitting into the mix—are aggregated to create an oddly powerful form of blues that verges on stadium rock psychedelia. He proves once again to be a defiant musician who shows that experimental forms can indeed be at least as emotionally potent as their formulaically crafted pop counterparts. The tracks by Sebastien Roux & Kim Myhr, Erdem Helvacioglu, and Keith Rowe are also a worthy time investment. In fact, all of the tracks on this disc are rather pleasant on a basic level, but it may take multiple sittings to build up the stamina needed to endure and decipher their ideological density.
Mapsadaisical Of course, a single CD compilation could hardly hope to do justice to the full range of Guitar In The 21st Century. Thankfully, the liner notes are quick to disavow any notion of comprehensiveness, describing this as a mere “collection of works providing a contemporary perspective of the unconventional sounds that can be generated from the guitar”. Which is great news, for if there is something that this site appreciates more than an unconventional sound generated by a guitar, it has yet to hear it. Quiet Design survey this landscape over the course of eight tracks sourced from around the globe, covering a range from minimalist acoustic through distortion, drone and EAI to outsider folk. Tetuzi Akiyama’s opening “Three Short Pieces” features intense and sparse close-miked acoustic guitar (slightly reminiscent of Derek Bailey at his most straight) with the long spaces between notes being coloured by the sounds of fingers on strings and Akiyama’s breathing. The album’s middle section is full of majestic drones, including Duane Pitre’s magnificent and slow-building “Music for Microtonal Guitar and Mallet” and label curator Cory Allen’s “Fermion“, in which he liberally sprays his gritty granulated guitar while a bell tolls forlornly in the distance. The contribution of young Turk Erdem Helvacioglu is a typically ambitious and fastidious composition, with about a billion different guitar sounds fashioning melodies which bunch in rippling flocks. The menacing change in mood which occurs next jars somewhat: this track is followed by the abrasive hum of Keith Rowe’s deconstruction of his instrument. Spectra fades out with a moan; Jandek’s “The World Ends” being a dark, strangely tuned piece of Americana. With Spectra: Guitar In The 21st Century, Quiet Design have stabbed their flag into a huge chunk of the experimental hinterland. Check out the legality of their claims by visiting their site to hear more, and to pick up a copy of this fine compilation.
Cyclic Defrost While grandiose the title of this discrete compilation, in that it marks an area of guitar and sound endeavor at a specific time period assuming an overarching view of the global scene of guitar craftsmen, the claim remains to a degree true. There is also a truth in saying that a certain amount of positioning of what constitutes the frontier of sound in any given time period is an arena of contest and the claim is really to be taken as an assertion. After all the founders of Quiet Design, Cory Allen and Mike Vernusky who curate this compilation are represented and all representations demark their orientation towards sound: being an experimental act with the focal interest on high technical proficiency and the boundary of the possibilities of the device, albeit in a quiet manner. Tetuzi Akiyama’s Three Small Pieces opens with time discretion extended, precise minimal guitar and attention to the longevity and tonality of decay demarking time, underpinning the melodic elements and highlighting the silence. Sebestian Roux & Kim Myhr focus on an interplay between electronic and acoustic with guitar and effect melded in and becoming indistinct with the severity of manipulation and oblique uses of the instrument. Mike Vernusky contributes Nylah, a wash of tonal distortions, dissonance, soundscaped ambience and manipulated sonic thrall. Cory Allen’s Fermion broods and builds its hum and elements into cyclic reverence throwing wave after wave of guitar precise static. Erdem Helvacioglu contributes the standout track of the compilation, both in the variety of its technical manipulation, experimentation, electronic elements without losing sight of the tradition of the instrument and his cultural location. It has the play of such a wide, full and glistening palate that it is both difficult listening and open simultaneously. Jandek’s The World stops is not only disturbing and alienating, even the strange ‘psychedelic lyrics’ he purports at best can be seen as gathering for the specific effect of distance and repulsion. It is a strange way to mark the end. While the compilation may not hold to be a through catalogue of contemporary guitar it does present four of the America’s finest exponents of experimental guitar and brings a number of standouts from the world scene to form this compilation from Quiet Design.
Perhaps it is a surprise that in a world filled technology, people still play the guitar. Sometimes solo, but more and more surrounded by the world of computers, picking up the sound and making treatments of the sound. On this compilation we find examples of both ends - from the empty, sparse notes of Tetuzi Akiyama to the guitar disappearance from Cory Allen, where the instrument seemingly gets lost in the computer. And everything in between those parameters. Eight pieces which are all around seven to ten minutes, so that we get a clear picture of what these musicians do. There are some names here of whom I never heard like Kim Myhr and Mike Vernusky, but mostly its people with some reputation on the scene like Sebastian Roux, Duane Pitre, Erdem Helvacioglu and two old masters of the guitar, Keith Rowe and Jandek, the latter adding, in his true outsider position, some voice to the strings. Its quite a strong compilation, a fine showcase of what these people do, with outstanding pieces by Duane Pitre and Keith Rowe - although from an entirely different end of things.
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