eclectic guitar
9:30pm-midnight
$12 or b.o.
rob chalfen & subconsciouscafe new chamber music
presents "2 non-sectarian guitars"
Robbie Lee – solo augmented guitar
Glenn Jones – solo acoustic guitar
ROBBIE LEE
New York-based multi-instrumentalist Robbie Lee keeps himself busy with a number of little-heard musical projects; this solo set of guitar improvisations is among his most recent. A wide variety of pedals and other noisemakers are deployed to manipulate electric guitars, but this isn’t your grandma's loop-based music. The sound reflects Lee’s love of the extremes of pop music, evoking not only the classic songwriting harmonies of the Beach Boys and the Kinks, but also the maverick experimentation of noisy heroes like Keiji Haino, Giacinto Scelsi, and John Fahey. The unexpected results of his music-making are unseemly, surprising, and exciting – like nothing you've ever heard.
GLENN JONES
Since 1989, Glenn Jones has led Boston’s “avant-garage” instrumental rock band, Cul de Sac, whose musical adventures are documented on 10 albums, including a soundtrack for cult-director Roger Corman (The Strangler’s Wife, 2003), and collaborations with guitarist John Fahey (The Epiphany of Glenn Jones, 1996), and former Can vocalist Damo Suzuki (Abhayamudra, 2004).
In 2001, Glenn began playing acoustic guitar, which he hadn’t touched in more than a decade, and the two most recent Cul de Sac studio albums (including the rapturously received Death of the Sun, 2003) have featured as much of his acoustic guitar as his electric.
A 30-plus-year devotee of the so-called “Takoma school,” Jones has written extensively on the label’s two leading lights: John Fahey, with whom he was friends for nearly 25 years, and Robbie Basho, who befriended Jones in the last five years of his life.
With former Takoma label guitarist Peter Lang -- along with Michael Gulezian, Loren Mazzacane Connors, Henry Kaiser, Gary Lucas, Tony Conrad and others -- Jones performed at sold-out concerts honoring John Fahey in New York City and San Francisco shortly after Fahey’s death in 2001.
In June 2004, Jones released his first solo acoustic guitar album, This Is the Wind That Blows It Out, for the Strange Attractors Audio House label. He followed it up with month-long tour of Europe with guitarist Jack Rose, including appearances on The John Peel Show and The Wire's ‘Resonance.’
REVIEWS:
“Gorgeous, luminous . . . scored across a series of open tunings, which he threads with beautiful rolling melodies, his slide work sounding like the flutter of tiny metal butterflies. . . . One of the best of the recent deluge.” --David Keenan, The Wire
". . . a kind of sensory magic at work. . . . It’s all done with a natural, unforced feel devoid of flash and etched in slow detail so every nuance of his vibrato and tone can be absorbed. Really, the right word is 'felt,' since these instrumental compositions all have genuine emotional resonance, no slight accomplishment." --Ted Drozdowski, Boston Phoenix
"From the slide blues opening of the title track, to the Spanish-tinged fingerpicking of ‘Sphinx Unto Curious Men’, Jones recalls such great Fahey albums as Dance of Death and Other Plantation Favourites and Days Have Gone By. . . . That figures like Jones and Sonic Youth are curating this music – and the centuries this music in turn curates – is perhaps surprising at first glance. But it's just the folk process: Canned Heat curating country blues, Hendrix updating its project and making it roar in vivid scarlet. That Sunburned Hand of the Man, Steffen-Basho Junghans and the new ‘anti-folk’ movement are here is laudable. So here's a map to the past, rich in detail, a necessary guide for anyone packing a rucksack, intending to move along that road, back to the future." --Michard Reltzer, Plan B Magazine
Production: Rob Chalfen