music for one

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MUSIC FOR ONE is your breath that you see on a cold day.

Stark but beautiful guitar motifs emerge as skeletons of songs. They are dressed in the skin of abstract sounds that are wrestled from a guitar, effects, and bits from the hardware store. This process is never laboured; it has the freedom of the moment to let the possibility of wonderful mistakes unfold. This creature comes alive in front of you... you've come to know it's every part. It's as chaotic as the times we live in; it can change at any given moment, effects boxes twisting the sound into a cavernous roar of feedback and throbbing clicks. Light and dark, loud and quiet, it's somewhat comforting to know that a guitar can still confuse and enchant an audience.

I try to quiet my restless soul with sounds. Music is like is the dressing for a wound but I'm all too aware that comfort and beauty are sometimes very removed from reality so I embrace the wrong and bleak and make them my own.

The problem with these words is that they define what I do at this moment where I hope what I do is an ever changing experiment. Something I am free to mutate. I hope that the future is different.


I think the future *is* different. On my trip to Canada this summer i acquired a beautiful metal-bodied acoustic resonator guitar. So I am now shunning electricity (only some areas of my life, mind) for acoustic wonderfulness. New sounds, ideas, and directions are always emerging but my delicate balance of emotive quiet and stillness up against bawdier bristleyness is there. What would have happened if electricity hadn't been invented? What would the acoustic blues musicians and folkies sound like today? What would John Cage and Morton Feldman sound like played on a dobro? Would all music be more improvisational? In truth these questions are somewhat of an afterthought...

I want to travel across this country I've come to know in trains and coaches and let this guitar steep in the countryside. I want it to absorb the atmosphere of backrooms of pubs, tea houses, little art galleries and squats with no electricity.

 

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