the (bathroom) sink of his imagination

It's not easy to invent a new sound world on a guitar, and when you do, people are either pretty impressed or laughter ensues.  No matter what, the easiest way to come up with new sounds is buy new toys.  They did provide a certain comfort as I was finding fewer and fewer collaborators willing to indulge me, and soon the time had to come to strike out with a solo project: DJ DATA DADA.   The digital looper layering wall-o-sound is kind of widespread these days, so instead I decided to program some gurgling organ patches, rhythmic delays, and twiddle with the battery-powered sampler velcroed to the front of my guitar synth. 

One night at the local coffee house, I fired up everything I had and did my best to remember a stream of lyrics that represent either rampant existentialism or the online dating experience.

chatroom apotheosis

As you can tell from the tepid applause, tongue-in-cheek retro tech doesn't exactly have a wide audience.  Sometimes it takes the twisted mind of a natural-born musical comedian to to express it like a real virtuoso.

Sweden's Mattias IA Eklundh has taken that avant-comedic torch Frank Zappa pioneered and bottled it in a combustible compound that spurts of his hands like Silly String; his signature sound is tactile, fluid, and can be shaped in way too many ways.  It would still be easy to dismiss him as just another heavy metal wanker, I suppose... or at least until you check out his rendition of Ludwig van Beethoven's Triple Concerto on YouTube.  In Chopstick Boogie, though, he demonstrates that the chops he developed when he was originally a young drum student can be mashed-up, throwing in the (bathroom) sink of his imagination.  Along with pretty much anything else he can get his hands on.

a parallel future for the electric guitar

It was only a matter of time before what came to be known as electronic music captured the mainstream imagination, and I appreciated how the resultant rave scene was bringing concert goers together like never before.

In 2000, inspired by the demo cassettes from a prodigious teenager named Chad Carrier, I began to sketch out xy techno theatre, a portable extravaganza that combined Chad's production concepts, an interactive audience virtual environment, and live theater courtesy of my brother, Ian, and his wife, Andi.

xy techno theatre

Not only was all this techno multimedia a good excuse to experiment with crazed guitar processing, but there were times when I attempted a similarly multi-dimensional guitar technique that had just been taken to a stratospheric level of development by a one-time New York street musician by the name of Stanley Jordan.  

Like Van Halen, his childhood background as a piano student led him down the path of a two-handed string tapping approach, but his net effect was even more unbelievable: it's like each of his hands has its own independent brain, the sound of two guitarists playing at once.  After he exploded out of the blue and unannounced at the 1984 Kool Jazz Festival, some of the most successful players in the business wondered whether from then on, it would be impossible for any guitarist to ignore the new universe of possibilities he'd exposed; that an unforeseen, parallel future for the electric guitar was laid out before us all.  After a few years, though, it became clear that virtually nobody was going to retool their whole way of thinking about the instrument and follow in his footsteps, after all.  Now Jordan's delicate, spidery solos do not automatically endear him to head-bangers, but in this rendition of the Beatles' Eleanor Rigby, he proves that when tap comes to slap, he can still light 'em up:

Stanley Jordan - Eleanor Rigby

altar of fire

A lot of lonely woodshedding has to occur to produce a bonafide shredder, but rock and roll is still supposed to be about getting together and having a good time.  Those last years of graduate school, I drafted all my friends, friends of friends, girl friends, people I wanted to be girl friends, all rounded up for what became semi-annual multi-media musical events at the local planetarium, Pink Floyd-style.


Some were seduced by the Blues Brothers reunion ambience for a time, though by all accounts, I was a harsh task master, and few lasted long.  Blinky's Last Ticket, which resulted in an album called QUADRIVIUM, was a collection of originals, each of which was supposed to represent a different amusement park ride.  For our haunted house segment, like so many horror flick soundtracks, there were definitely some classical music stylings...


O.K.

This might have been a pretty original approach had it not been for the spectre of the most notorious shredmeister of them all, Ynwgie Malmsteen.

His raw speed and articulation had already made such an impression that guitarists were unwittingly absorbing influences he brought back from old dead white guys; here was a rock star who actually thanked Antonio Vivaldi and Johann Sebastian Bach on the back of every record.  But bounding onto the international stage at a time during which it seemed Eddie Van Halen had already canvassed every single possibility of the heavy metal guitar, the young Swede succeeded in contributing one final element that would elude so many of his many imitators: emotional intensity.  And for every blues purist who would dismiss the long-haired Viking's output as merely notes per second, there shall be two who worship at his altar of fire: