instrumental guitar
Album review: Shane Parish – ‘Liverpool’: pulling sea shanties leftfield and forward, forward, ho! for a post-industrial, post-rock generation KICKERS
IF YOU don’t know Shane Parish and his oeuvre – and chances are, unless you’re a regular reader of Wire and the deeper corners of Pitchfork and suchlike, you possibly don’t – be prepared to have a new guitar soli-meets-postrock pin-up rock up on your block, as his new album, Liverpool, takes what might be …
Album review: Duncan Marquiss – ‘Wires Turned Sideways In Time’: Phantom Band guitarist conceives of an instrumental, pastoral motorik for a place yet to exist
FROM disastrous events that upend your world can sometimes come good things; sometimes, I’m no Pollyanna here. Fortunately for Duncan Marquiss, guitarist with Chemikal Underground’s The Phantom Band, a major setback has led to another path, and a rather excellent one, albeit eventually. That quartet, with four albums such as Fears Trending and The Wants …
Album review: Dragon Welding – ‘The Lights Behind The Eyes’: a new ambient folk for a beleaguered island from The Wolfhounds’ six-string sufi
IF YOU consider yourself a fan of great British guitar music and you haven’t investigated the canon of East London-Essex borderlands’ The Wolfhounds, then jeez, do you ever need to put that right – immediatement. Coming out of the C86 wave of bands and featuring on that legendary/infamous tape (please delete according to personal taste) …
See: The acid prism of Plankton Wat’s ‘Modern Ruins’: a delicious psychedelic instrumental response to our fracturing world
DEWEY MAHOOD, the atmospheric psychedelic guitarist who released his twelfth album as Plankton Wat for Thrill Jockey, Future Times, in late February, has dropped the shroom-surreal video for one of that excellent album’s standout tracks, “Modern Ruins”, a track all garlanded about with echo and twang-shimmer and flutes – you can watch that below. The …
See: The solarised dazzle of Dragon Welding’s ‘Scorched Sea’: a furnace extrusion of white-hot instrumental guitar
THE WOLFHOUNDS’ Andy Golding, one of the most potent wielders (welders?) of a guitar in operation in these tarnished isles today, is releasing only his second solo album under his anagrammatic Dragon Welding moniker in May, in which he sets sail into the possibilities of instrumental guitar. It’s gonna be an excellent journey, that album, …
ALBUM REVIEW: Cameron Knowler & Eli Winter – ‘Anticipation’: excellent studies in twin guitar primitivism
We don’t get to hear quite enough of the modern fingerpicking style this side of the Atlantic, so if you’ve drifted off from the form somewhat since Jack Rose passed, or wish to explore beyond William Tyler; then hell; start right here. A grand tour of two instruments and two musical minds woven together so tightly and also unravelling like fronds of a fern, seeking all the multiplicity of new directions in folk. An excellent record
Track: Deniz Cuylan – ‘Object Of Desire’: a second luscious essay in solo guitar pastoralism
TURKISH multi-instrumentalist and composer Deniz Cuylan, whose altogether lovely experimental classical guitar essay “Flaneurs In Hakon” we fell for a fortnight back, has proved that he has plenty more guitar craft up his sleeve with his second single drop from his soon-coming album, “Object Of Desire” which, if you’re of a certain instrumental guitar inclination, …
Track: Cameron Knowler & Eli Winter share the spiralling guitar wonder of ‘Parapraxis of a Dragonfly’
TWO ADEPT young guns of the fingerstyle guitar, Cameron Knowler and Eli Winter really came to appreciate each other on a winter tour of the Trans-Pecos region of West Texas. The Trans-Pecos is a land of stark beauty, of ghost towns and mountain ranges. The pair spent the winter of 2018 gigging through the small …
See: Deniz Cuylan – ‘Flaneurs In Hakone’: stunning, chiming guitar soli from Turkish composer
IT ALL started with Beethoven’s Fifth. That’s LA-based, Istanbul-born composer and exponent of modern guitar composition Deniz Cuylan’s first and wholly abiding memory of music; it’s the early Eighties, he’s at home in the Turkish capital, all of 5, and the Fifth is spinning on his parents’ turntable. Duh-duh duh-duh … the grandiosity, the majesty …
ALBUM REVIEW: William Tyler – ‘Music From First Cow’: chiming soundtrackery from Tennessee gent
IT SHOULDN’T really come as a surprise to anyone who has followed William Tyler’s solo career, or heard him give the background to any of his seductive, chiming guitar odysseys, that the day would come when he moved into soundtrackery – and perhaps particularly, the soundtracks for a well-made film about the old Americas. He has …