STEVE GUNN

Native Philadelphian, Steve Gunn has been a stalwart of the American experimental scene for close to a decade. For some years, Gunn has slowly cultivated his own solo work alongside his involvements with other projects and musicians. Over the course of numerous excellent releases, it became clear that Gunn was a real force. Once his solo music started being unearthed, there was no turning back. Steve will be performing a mix of improvisational based acoustic guitar works, and songs from his latest album ‘Boerum Palace’ on Three Lobed Recordings.

TOM CARTER

Born barely south of the Mason-Dixon line, and just in time for the Summer of Love, Tom Carter led a decidedly non-hippy existence being shuffled around various farm and mining towns in Maryland and Ohio by his newspaperman father, before finally making his way to Texas in 1985, just in time to watch all the good hardcore bands die. Already obsessed with American pre-punk and British post-punk, Carter dove into the lysergically spiked musical waters of Texas with both feet, augmenting rudimentary guitar skills with unreliable instruments, cranky analog electronics, and disintegrating practice amps. Over the ensuing decades, he managed to forge his evolving ideas of complete tonal immersion (and the quest for the perfect fuzz tone) into a layered sonic toolkit of rough beauty and unrefined proficiency.

MARCIA BASSETT
Bassett aka Zaimph, predominately uses guitar and vocals to create sounds that shimmer in a dark metallic buzz of sonic noise and drone, before a swift shift into blissed out ragas or crippling, brutal, white-hot noise. The organic improvised elements of Bassett’s work leave traces of eerie ghost voices and deep-space echoes that recall the electrified ritual of nomadic Japanese avant gardists Taj Mahal Travellers — but more immediately sound like a magnification of her contributions to Double Leopards and Hototogisu, generating towers of electricity that move from malevolent arcs of anti-gravity and spumes of throttled single notes into deep wormholes that do violence to feeble notions of time and space.

MICHAEL CHAPMAN

The guitar and voice of Michael Chapman first became known on the Cornish Folk Circuit in 1967. Playing a blend of atmospheric and autobiographical material he established a reputation for intensity and innovation. Signed to EMI’s Harvest label he recorded a quartet of classic albums. LPs like ‘Rainmaker’ and ‘Wrecked Again’ defined the melancholic observer role Michael was to make his own, mixing intricate guitar instrumentals with a full band sound. The influential album ‘Fully Qualified Survivor’, featuring the guitar of Mick Ronson and Rick (Steeleye Span) Kemp’s bass, was John Peel’s favourite album of 1970. ‘Survivor’ featured the Chapman ‘hit’, “Postcards of Scarborough”, a characteristically tenderly sour song recounting the feelings of nostalgia and regret.

GLENN JONES
From 1989 to 2009, Jones led Boston’s “avant -garage” instrumental rock band, Cul de Sac, whose musical adventures are documented on nine albums (a final studio album is planned), including a soundtrack for director Roger Corman, and collaborations with guitarist John Fahey and former Can vocalist Damo Suzuki.

In 2001, Glenn began playing acoustic guitar, his first instrument, which he’d barely touched in more than a decade, and Cul de Sac’s highly regarded meditation on mortality, Death of the Sun (2003), features as much acoustic guitar as electric. A 30-plus-year devotee of the so-called “Takoma school,” Jones has written extensively on the movement’s leading lights: John Fahey, with whom he was friends for nearly 25 years, and Robbie Basho, who befriended Jones during the five years before his untimely death in1986. As interest in the “old guard” — Fahey, Basho, Peter Lang, Peter Walker and others — has grown, a new fraternity of guitarists has risen, artists whose reasons for playing are exploration, communication and expression, rather than the display of flashy technique, or the creation of sonic wallpaper. Since 2004, Jones his issued three albums, This Is the Wind That Blows It Out, Against Which the Sea Continually Beats, and 2009’s Barbecue Bob in Fishtown (all for Strange Attractors Audio House), albums that wend their way through a varied stylistic terrain. “American Primitive,” blues, rustic Mississippi Delta slide and bastardized classical forms cozy up to one another, sometimes within the same tune.