Keith Rowe uses a battery-powered fan and steel wool to agitate a spring placed on the
pickup of a
miniature guitar at the AMPLIFY 2008 Festival in Tokyo. Photo by Yuko Zama
Frontiersmen Of Freakonia
Rowe was one of the earliest practitioners of
extended techniques, and his band AMM
played alongside the adventurous, Syd
Barrett-captained version of Pink Floyd at
the height of the psychedelic London scene.
(Check out early footage of Barrett and the
Floyd playing “Interstellar Overdrive” to see
how Rowe’s techniques may have slipped
into the mainstream.) His ventures into the
bizarre were a matter of emulating techniques
he applied to his visual artwork.
“I encountered so many problems with
the approach I had to playing standard guitar,”
says Rowe. “In my jazz-guitar world,
I could not satisfactorily locate the idea
of something like ‘ambiguity’—which, in
the visual arts, was seen as important.” He
found that laying the instrument flat on a
table allowed him to apply a more painterly
approach, likening it to Jackson Pollock
placing the canvas on the floor. Further,
in transmitting sounds from the airwaves
through a radio’s headphone placed over
the pickup, Rowe found parallels with the
collage-like art of Robert Rauschenberg.
Rowe presses steel wool onto the strings of a Shadow Reinaldo Rivero Finger Trainer that’s outfi tted
with a pickup. Electronics in Rowe’s rig include a Z.Vex Fuzz Factory, a Boss RC-2 Loop Station,
an
MXR 6-Band EQ, and a Boss PS-3 Pitch Shifter/Delay. Photo by Yuko Zama
For American composer Roger Kleier
(who has collaborated with Frith, Elliott
Sharp, and Marc Ribot, among others), an
encounter with a John Cage piece for prepared
piano—meaning miscellaneous items
such as paper and clothespins were placed
on the strings—inspired attacking the guitar
with unusual implements.
“I was struck by how Cage could take
one instrument and turn it into a new
sound universe,” says Kleier. Frith’s first
solo album, 1974’s
Guitar Solos, revealed to
Kleier how he too could enter this world.
“He sounded like an army of guitarists making
these unusual sounds,” he says. “On the
back of the record cover, he is pictured playing
guitar with this piece of glass, and there
are electrician’s clips on the strings. I realized
I could do prepared guitar, as opposed to
prepared piano. I ran down to the hardware
store and started buying stuff.”
Frith, too, was inspired by Cage, among
others, to explore the full range of sounds
available from an electric guitar. “In 1970,
I had a friend build me an aluminum
harness holding a pickup, which could
be bolted onto the nut,” explains Frith.
“With this pickup suspended above the
first fret, I had a completely new instrument:
the conventional electric guitar,
along with an asymmetrical mirror image,
with logarithmic scales running the ‘wrong’
way.” Frith notated the scales and learned
to incorporate this new set of notes using
tapping techniques—well before Eddie Van
Halen. Still, he soon abandoned that line
of research in favor of a more
sound-based
(as opposed to
note-based) approach. “At
some point in the early ’70s, I saw [Flying
Lizards guitarist] David Toop using alligator
clips on his guitar, and that led me to start
‘preparing’ the instrument in various ways,
using clips and anything else that seemed
useful and sounded interesting,” says Frith.