Sir Richard Bishop - The Freak of Araby

Requested.

The latest album from former Sun City Girls guitarist Sir Richard Bishop. Lots of Egyptian and middle eastern infuenced playing from Bishop on this one.

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Sir Richard Bishop - While My Guitar Violently Bleeds (2007)

Yet another amazing 2007 release.

"This is an essential document by one of America's most original and inventive unaccompanied guitarists
working today. "While My Guitar Violently Bleeds" is a splendid three piece gem in which the good Sir
branches out & nods to points west, east & otherworldly. Classic spaghetti western tinged spidery fretwork
("Zurvan"), Fushitsusha style feedback drenched psych decay ("Smashana") and a brilliant lengthy raga
epic ("Mahavidya") round out the proceedings by the Sun City Girls master musician."

"Bishop creates abstract and dissonant fingerstyle webs that evoke those famous LSD experiments with spiders and he stretches
out in long raga-influenced improvisations that accelerate into flatpicked furies." -Acoustic Guitar

i'm so smart now

The Nels Cline Singers

It's been a while mah boys!! I've been busy as fuck but soon enough I'll be posting music on a more regular basis.

If you don't know who Nels Cline is, then here's some info. REALLY amazing guitarist and musician who's also got a thing for Fender Jazzmasters. He's the lead guitarist of the band Wilco, plus he's known for collaborating with a lot of people and has got a solo project of his own. His 2009 release "Coward" is really good! The Nels Cline Singers are a free jazz trio led by Nels Cline, following his work in the Nels Cline Trio. Despite it's name, there's no singing in the actual music. :) I encourage my fellow bloggers (I'm looking at you Ozstriker!) to post some more of his stuff. I'll try and upload more of his music later this week. Hopefully, I'll also post some Banyan which also features Nels Cline and the Minutemen's Mike Watt.

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"Nels Cline (born in Los Angeles in 1956) is an American guitarist and composer. He began to play guitar at age 12 when his twin brother, Alex Cline took up the drums. Cline is not classically trained. This gives him a unique avant-garde style that many other jazz guitarists fail to match, due to their probable conventional training. He is noted for his apt use of effects pedals and looping devices, which enhances his style and gives his approach to guitar and music a distinct sound.

Cline is known for his improvisational work and for the diversity of his musical projects. He has played with jazz musicians Charlie Haden, Gregg Bendian, Wadada Leo Smith, Tim Berne, Vinny Golia and the late bassist Eric von Essen, a longtime musical companion in the L.A. jazz group Quartet Music.

Cline has also performed and recorded with punk rock hero Mike Watt in his touring bands The Crew of the Flying Saucer and The Black Gang, as well as with members of Sonic Youth and country music legend Willie Nelson, and in the jazz/punk/improv band Banyan with Watt and ex-Jane’s Addiction drummer Stephen Perkins. He frequently participates in jazz projects with his twin brother, Alex, however their first actual duo together was in Culver City, California, during their 50th birthday show.

Nels’s first appearance on an album was on Vinny Golia’s 1978 record, Openhearted, and his first work as a bandleader was 1988’s Angelica. In the late 1980s, Cline formed the Nels Cline Trio, which featured his guitar playing complemented by Mark London Sims at bass and Michael Preussner at drums. The trio released several 7 inch demos and one album, before replacing Sims with Bob Mair at bass. This new trio released three albums before splitting up, featuring some of Cline’s most melodic works, before he ventured into a freer and more minimalist territory in the decade to come. Shortly before the end of the trio, Nels recorded two albums, In-Store, and Pillow Wand, with Sonic Youth frontman and guitarist, Thurston Moore. In 1999, Cline paired up with jazz drummer Gregg Bendian to record a modern rendition of John Coltrane’s 1967 album, Interstellar Space. On Interstellar Space Revisited: The Music of John Coltrane, Bendian and Cline boldly interpret Coltrane’s already obscure piece using their musical backgrounds and talents, and create an album whose music is written by Coltrane, but whose sound is distinctly associated with musicians who perform it. Cline’s current outfit is the improv/free jazz ensemble The Nels Cline Singers, with which he has recorded two albums, Instumentals and The Giant Pin, his most recent work as a leader. The Nels Cline Singers are currently signed with Cryptogramophone Records.

Cline has performed on over 100 albums in the jazz, pop, rock, country, and experimental music genres. He continues to expand his audience as a member of the Grammy-winning rock band Wilco, which he joined in early 2004. He was later featured in the cover story of Guitar Player Magazine for his newfound collaboration with the band."



RIGHT OUHSAAHDE MAH DO-OH!

Glenn Branca - The Ascension

Long live Branca.

"If one chooses to categorize the music on this recording as "rock," this is surely one of the greatest rock albums ever made. But there's the rub. While sporting many of the trappings of the genre -- the instrumentation (electric guitars), the rhythms, the volume, and, most certainly, the attitude -- there is much about The Ascension that doesn't fit comfortably into the standard definition of the term. Not only does the structure of the compositions appear to owe more to certain classical traditions, including Romanticism, than the rock song form, but Branca's overarching concern is with the pure sound produced, particularly of the overtones created by massed, "out of tune," excited strings and the ecstatic quality that sound can engender in the listener. Though his prior performing experience was with post-punk, no-wave groups like the Static and Theoretical Girls, it could be argued that the true source of much of the music here lies in the sonic experimentation of deep-drone pioneers like La Monte Young and Phil Niblock. Happily, the music is accessible enough that one can jump right in, regardless of one's direction of approach. Branca's band, unlike some of his later enormous ensembles, is relatively modest (four guitars, bass guitar, and drums), so the sound is comparatively clear and each member's contributions may be easily discerned. The chiming notes that begin "The Spectacular Commodity" are allowed to hover in the air, awash in overtones, before being subsumed into a rolling groove that picks up more and more intensity as guitar chords cascade one atop another, threatening to, but never succeeding in, toppling the whole affair. "Structure" plays with sonic torque, whipsawing between two differently stressed voicings of the same theme, pulling them back and forth like taffy. But the title track is both the consummation of the record and the surest indication of Branca's direction in later years. It begins with a marvelously dense haze of ringing guitars, feedback, and percussion, with a foreboding bassline contributing to the strong sense of disorientation. Midway through, it abruptly shifts to harsh blocks of sound over a rapid rhythm, the blocks differing in texture but played in alternating sections, smacking into each other and further heightening the tension. These disparate sounds eventually coalesce into a pure, ringing tone that, over the last minute of the piece, explodes into a spectacular cacophony, a seism of bell tones, microtonal eruptions, and near orgasmic guitar bliss. An absolutely stunning, jaw-dropping performance. Branca's music has served as a major inspiration to many alternative rock bands that surfaced in the '80s and '90s, notably Sonic Youth; both Lee Ranaldo (who plays on this recording) and Thurston Moore were regularly members of his early ensembles. The Ascension, in addition to being an utterly superb album on its own merits, uniquely invites listening from both adventurous rock fans and aficionados of experimental electronic music. For years, the vinyl release on 99 Records, with its stunning cover illustration by Robert Longo, was a highly sought-after collector's item. It was finally issued to compact disc in 1999 by New Tone." - Brian Olewnick

Lightfield

Allan Holdsworth @ Inter Metro 2/19/2009

First of all I want to invite my fellow chasm filler. bloggers to post any material featuring this artist. Ozstriker I'm talking to you!

Allan Holdworth will be giving a class next Wednesday February 18th at 2:30 pm and will be playing live at the Inter Metro's theatre Thursday February 19th at 8:00pm.

"Allan Holdsworth (born August 6, 1946) is a British guitarist and composer. He has played many different styles of music over a period of four decades, but is now best known for his work within the jazz fusion genre.
Holdsworth's first recording was with the band Igginbottom on their lone release, Igginbottom's Wrench, in 1969 (which was later reissued under the group name of "Allan Holdsworth & Friends"). In the early 1970s, he joined Tempest, upon which the albums Tempest (1973) and Living in Fear (1974) were released during his brief time spent with the band.
Following this, Holdsworth worked with various popular jazz fusion groups and artists, including Gong, Soft Machine, The New Tony Williams Lifetime, Jean-Luc Ponty and, later in the decade, the progressive rock band UK."

Tom Verlaine - Warm and Cool

A few days ago Abe asked me about albums similar to Ry Cooder's soundtrack work in "Paris, Texas". I told him some few names and albums, but I totally forgot about this glorious solo effort by Television guitar maestro Verlaine. He crosses all moods from aggressive to deeply melancholic in his brilliant playing while the original Television rhythm section (Billy Ficca and Fred Smith) give rock solid support, even throwing some krautrock rhythm pulses here and there. But it's Verlaine who's the one allowed to shine, and they know it, so they just stand back and let him soar. Awesome.

w & c

Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos - The Prosthetic Cubans

Continuing with some more Cuban influenced music I'll include this gem by guitarist Marc Ribot who's most famous for working with Tom Waits and John Zorn. He explores his love of Cuban music and the great Cuban band leader Arsenio Rodriguez with a collection of covers and original tracks played with his unique style.

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