A Peripheral Blur

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Along with such contemporaries - and sometimes collaborators - as Jim O'Rourke, Kazuyuki K Null and Roy Montgomery, James Plotkin is helping reinvent the guitar as a source of unexpected sounds. As a third of prog-thrashers OLD he pretty much rocked out (although very, very well) but since those days he's been using more and more complex signal processing to elicit ever-more unrecognisable sounds from the instrument. Mark Spybey, former zoviet*france person, similarly applies massive FX processing to his instruments, but uses a whole range of toys and "ethnic" stringed instruments alongside the electric guitar. The two improvisers first came together for a performance at the 1996 Anchorage festival under Brooklyn Bridge. For that performance they both worked in the way they prefer - as on-the-hoof improvisers, playing for the first time in front of an audience, with no prep at all. For this recording, they have attempted to recreate the conditions - but not the music - in, as it were, a "virtual" sense, with Spybey sending first-take improvisations to Plotkin who would then augment them with his own playing and production. The results are largely pretty stunning, with the pair very obviously in touch with each others' aesthetic. The music is - often at once - both edgy and very lush, its sources and inner workings utterly unrecognisable. A valuable addition to both musicians' considerable canons.