Well, the first passing I learned about via my Mastodon timeline, and it’s a devastating one … R.I.P. Keith Levene, guitar mangler extraordinaire.
My friends — the below video has always been my favorite thing sitting on YouTube, hands down. I’ve posted it here before, but here we go again. What Keith does here with rhythm, noise, a guitar, and a synthesizer shatters the Fermi Paradox. He was an alien reaching out to us. If only we knew how to properly receive the signals.
❝ Picking up from the staccato guitar patterns that ran through Hubris, Shebang’s single 35-minute track begins with a precisely interwoven lattice of chiming guitar figures, expanding Hubris’ monolithic pulse into a joyous, hyper-rhythmic melodicism that calls up points of reference as disparate as Albert Marcoeur, early Pat Metheny Group, and Henry Kaiser’s It’s A Wonderful Life. Building from isolated single notes into densely layered polyrhythms, the muted guitar tones are joined by subtle touches of shimmering Leslie cabinet tones and guitar synth. ❞ *
Only eight minutes of the full album are available until the release date (September 30) but no doubt the complete recording will prove to be a deeply meditative stream of sounds ideal for brain focus.
Robert Fripp demonstrates Frippertronics on Midnight Special, immediately after thanking Rick James.
❝ The tape supply reel was placed on the first deck, in Record mode, and the take-up reel on the second, in Playback mode, with the tape threaded between the two machines and the output of the second deck fed back to the input of the first. The result was both a delay of several seconds, depending on the distance between the two tape machines, and a buildup of sound from the feedback loop that, together, created a dense ambient drone of the just-past and the now-present performance – an aural pentimento. ❞ *
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