Another record which I don't think really gets it due is Santana's absolutely fucking astonishing early 70s live album, Lotus. I hadn't listened to it for a while until someone mentioned it on Twitter a few days ago, and I'd almost forgotten just how fucking good it is. Face-meltingly intense at times, this is not the swinging latin west coast sound of the earlier stuff, but a fearsomely psychedelic jazz rock meltdown which has more in common with Dark Magus and On The Corner for much of it's duration than any of their own back catalogue.
I mean, it opens with a huge Alice Coltrane cover (Going Home), then slams into the more than a bit electric Miles 'A-1 Funk' in the midst of an echoplex ring mod laser battle and doesn't take it's foot off the gas for more than a few seconds at a time. It's six or seven minutes in that it really starts to kill, Carlos Santana's guitar scything into Every Step Of The Way's brooding funk with seriously violent intent. Fuck it, I could write about it all fucking day and still not convey just how fucking storming this record is, so here's the whole two hours...
And yes, that is Leon Thomas on vocals and percussion.
Showing posts with label guitars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label guitars. Show all posts
Sunday, 12 August 2012
Sunday, 5 February 2012
El Tejedor
This is fucking brilliant. I can't overstate how much of an influence John Martyn has had on my guitar playing. This may surprise some people, but bear with me, this will make sense when you've seen this fucking fantastic version of Skip James' I'd Rather Be The Devil, from 1973.
Bastard. That's just so fucking good. It doesn't matter how many times I hear that song, I'll never, ever tire of that echoplex guitar. And I'll happily and shamelessly rip it off wholesale when I'm in the mood, because unlike so many echo/loop pedal fiends who (consciously or otherwise) use the Göttsching/Hillage/Fripp/Pinhas style of looping and layering, John Martyn never wasn't much of a looper, preferring to use the percussive nature of the dying echoes along with what is possibly the greatest left hand of any guitarist I've ever seen to create a shifting, pulsing forward motion that has more in common with a conga player than the usual billowing tonefloat associated with heavy delay abusers. And that, in a nutshell, is why I love his guitar so much, he took the same tools as so many other contemporary musicians, went completely his own way with them, and in the process created a whole new perspective with them, one which was decidedly not ambient and slowly evolving, but simultaneously driving and fluid, so you don't hear the tapestry, you hear the shuttling of the loom, and trust me, that's way fucking harder to do.
Bastard. That's just so fucking good. It doesn't matter how many times I hear that song, I'll never, ever tire of that echoplex guitar. And I'll happily and shamelessly rip it off wholesale when I'm in the mood, because unlike so many echo/loop pedal fiends who (consciously or otherwise) use the Göttsching/Hillage/Fripp/Pinhas style of looping and layering, John Martyn never wasn't much of a looper, preferring to use the percussive nature of the dying echoes along with what is possibly the greatest left hand of any guitarist I've ever seen to create a shifting, pulsing forward motion that has more in common with a conga player than the usual billowing tonefloat associated with heavy delay abusers. And that, in a nutshell, is why I love his guitar so much, he took the same tools as so many other contemporary musicians, went completely his own way with them, and in the process created a whole new perspective with them, one which was decidedly not ambient and slowly evolving, but simultaneously driving and fluid, so you don't hear the tapestry, you hear the shuttling of the loom, and trust me, that's way fucking harder to do.
Wednesday, 14 September 2011
Procede El Weedian
I spent most of last week asleep, and then spent the whole weekend awake*. Now that I'm once more functioning on something approaching a human circadian rhythm and my pupils no longer look like piss-holes in the snow, there will be posts aplenty once more...
The other reason I haven't posted much is because I (huge shock coming here) bought a new guitar, a Gretsch Baritone Jet to be precise, which is actually a 6-string bass which thinks it's a guitar and can be seen modelled by (a somewhat dishevelled) yrs truly in the blurry photo below...
It's a shame the photo's so blurry, because you can't really see the outrageously sparkly black and metal flake finish, or the fake abalone** pickguard, which look sorta like the materials the toilets in a over-fussy middle-eastern restaurant would be made of, but the person who took the photo was frankly having trouble focusing their eyes, let alone a fucking camera. But I digress. It's fucking awesome, looks like the epitome of 60s trash, sounds like the bastard offspring of a Gretsch guitar and a Rickenbacker bass, and with that Bigsby tremolo and a bottleneck, has opened up a whole new vista of low-end wrong in my never-ceasing quest for the most outrageous, disgusting guitar sounds known to man, and every time I've meant to come online and blog something, I've ended up playing the fucker and forgetting what it was I was going to bang on about.
And I'm truly sorry to any of my neighbours who have been disturbed by my playing along to Sleep's Holy Mountain, but it was inevitable as soon as I realised I could get the patented Al Cisneros sproing sound, heard to best effect of course on Dragonaut. Which gives me the perfect excuse to post this again (it was on the old blog, now it's here too, don't tell me y're surprised)...
Fuck, I love that song so much. Sleep had a loping, lazy magic to their music which I've just never really heard in another doom band, plus they gave the world Matt Pike, who would now like to explain to you exactly what the fuck heavy means...
And believe me, he knows that of which he speaks. And that, of course, is an excuse to post this, the finest piece of metal (in any subgenre) ever fucking recorded. I speak of course of Devilution, by High On Fire, wherein Mr Pike demonstrates his theory of heavy to somewhat devastating effect.
So yeah, that's why I haven't posted lately. Sorry if this post is a load of rambling bollocks, but it's quite hard to think when y're listening to Dopesmoker and have been getting into the spirit of the track so I'll bugger off now and stop wasting your time and I'll write something that actually has some kind of purpose to it in a day or two...
*I do realise that these statements probably require some clarification...
**Mmmmm. Abalone...
The other reason I haven't posted much is because I (huge shock coming here) bought a new guitar, a Gretsch Baritone Jet to be precise, which is actually a 6-string bass which thinks it's a guitar and can be seen modelled by (a somewhat dishevelled) yrs truly in the blurry photo below...
It's a shame the photo's so blurry, because you can't really see the outrageously sparkly black and metal flake finish, or the fake abalone** pickguard, which look sorta like the materials the toilets in a over-fussy middle-eastern restaurant would be made of, but the person who took the photo was frankly having trouble focusing their eyes, let alone a fucking camera. But I digress. It's fucking awesome, looks like the epitome of 60s trash, sounds like the bastard offspring of a Gretsch guitar and a Rickenbacker bass, and with that Bigsby tremolo and a bottleneck, has opened up a whole new vista of low-end wrong in my never-ceasing quest for the most outrageous, disgusting guitar sounds known to man, and every time I've meant to come online and blog something, I've ended up playing the fucker and forgetting what it was I was going to bang on about.
And I'm truly sorry to any of my neighbours who have been disturbed by my playing along to Sleep's Holy Mountain, but it was inevitable as soon as I realised I could get the patented Al Cisneros sproing sound, heard to best effect of course on Dragonaut. Which gives me the perfect excuse to post this again (it was on the old blog, now it's here too, don't tell me y're surprised)...
Fuck, I love that song so much. Sleep had a loping, lazy magic to their music which I've just never really heard in another doom band, plus they gave the world Matt Pike, who would now like to explain to you exactly what the fuck heavy means...
And believe me, he knows that of which he speaks. And that, of course, is an excuse to post this, the finest piece of metal (in any subgenre) ever fucking recorded. I speak of course of Devilution, by High On Fire, wherein Mr Pike demonstrates his theory of heavy to somewhat devastating effect.
So yeah, that's why I haven't posted lately. Sorry if this post is a load of rambling bollocks, but it's quite hard to think when y're listening to Dopesmoker and have been getting into the spirit of the track so I'll bugger off now and stop wasting your time and I'll write something that actually has some kind of purpose to it in a day or two...
*I do realise that these statements probably require some clarification...
**Mmmmm. Abalone...
Monday, 22 August 2011
El Toro Arenoso Pt.1
Sandy Bull. One of the finest and most original guitarists America has ever produced, and for my money anyway, by far and way the best of the first wave of the so-called "American primitives*". "Blend", the appositely titled opening track to his first LP, Fantasias For Guitar & Banjo (Vanguard) is a twenty-odd minute dialogue between Bull's extraordinary acoustic guitar and the unstoppable invention of Billy Higgins' drumkit and assorted percussives, which manages to absorb modal jazz, blues, Indian, Middle-Eastern and Nubian influences into it's untouchable whole, at times coming on like a psychedelic acoustic Bo Diddley jamming with Can in a souk. And this was in 1963.
Yes, you did read that right, 1963. In the same fucking year as the fucking Beatles wheedled and whined their insipid way into the world's consciousness, and Coltrane was still a year or so away from A Love Supreme and tentatively dipping his toe into freer, more turbulent waters, Sandy Bull was... somewhere else, somewhere new, somewhere better. It's one of those records that's just too damn early, too fucking far ahead of the pack, that it seems to sit outside of the normal timeline, like a digital watch accidentally dropped in 1920 by a careless time-traveller. If this had fuzz on the guitar, it would be the exact music that Jerry Garcia and Jorma Kaukonen were trying so fucking hard to make in 1968. Those free-flying raga-tinged freakouts that came a few years down the line? They started here, and very few have ever come close.
More on the eclectic, erratic, eccentric genius of Mr Bull very soon, for now, I'll leave you with the full version of Blend for yr delectation, delight and other words beginning with "d".
*What a fucking stupid term for playing the acoustic guitar. I can't decide what I hate about it most; it's utter meaningless in the face of the sheer harmonic and technical sophistication that musicians like Jack Rose or (in his early days at least) Leo Kottke employed to conjour such dense, complex clouds of sound from their instruments**, or it's semantic and lexical dubiousness, reeking as it does of such lovely concepts as "noble savage" and the like, the term's implied presumption that music rooted in folk, blues or early country is somehow backward and unsophisticated. I don't care that the sainted John Fahey himself*** coined the term, apparently in homage to the French Primitive painters, it still rankles with me, with it's aura of condescension and it's unwitting borderline offensiveness. It displays that same fucking patronising 50s/60s attitude as all those sniffy white folk fans who got all up in a froth when black people dared to play the blues on electric guitars because it wasn't "authentic". It's all fucking folk music, get over yrselves, and yr silly fucking ideas.
**Go and listen to Jack Rose's Raag Manifestos and tell me there's anything primitive about this music. Well, you can if you like, but you'd be wrong and I'd probably just tell you to fuck off.
***Sarcasm. Of the heavy handed kind.
Yes, you did read that right, 1963. In the same fucking year as the fucking Beatles wheedled and whined their insipid way into the world's consciousness, and Coltrane was still a year or so away from A Love Supreme and tentatively dipping his toe into freer, more turbulent waters, Sandy Bull was... somewhere else, somewhere new, somewhere better. It's one of those records that's just too damn early, too fucking far ahead of the pack, that it seems to sit outside of the normal timeline, like a digital watch accidentally dropped in 1920 by a careless time-traveller. If this had fuzz on the guitar, it would be the exact music that Jerry Garcia and Jorma Kaukonen were trying so fucking hard to make in 1968. Those free-flying raga-tinged freakouts that came a few years down the line? They started here, and very few have ever come close.
More on the eclectic, erratic, eccentric genius of Mr Bull very soon, for now, I'll leave you with the full version of Blend for yr delectation, delight and other words beginning with "d".
*What a fucking stupid term for playing the acoustic guitar. I can't decide what I hate about it most; it's utter meaningless in the face of the sheer harmonic and technical sophistication that musicians like Jack Rose or (in his early days at least) Leo Kottke employed to conjour such dense, complex clouds of sound from their instruments**, or it's semantic and lexical dubiousness, reeking as it does of such lovely concepts as "noble savage" and the like, the term's implied presumption that music rooted in folk, blues or early country is somehow backward and unsophisticated. I don't care that the sainted John Fahey himself*** coined the term, apparently in homage to the French Primitive painters, it still rankles with me, with it's aura of condescension and it's unwitting borderline offensiveness. It displays that same fucking patronising 50s/60s attitude as all those sniffy white folk fans who got all up in a froth when black people dared to play the blues on electric guitars because it wasn't "authentic". It's all fucking folk music, get over yrselves, and yr silly fucking ideas.
**Go and listen to Jack Rose's Raag Manifestos and tell me there's anything primitive about this music. Well, you can if you like, but you'd be wrong and I'd probably just tell you to fuck off.
***Sarcasm. Of the heavy handed kind.
Friday, 19 November 2010
De Gama Baja Lujuria
*I know that's not that long. However, I have a bit of a... problem, and 3 years is like a lifetime for my instrument lust to remain unsatiated.
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