Cloud Control - New Wave Disco Ambulance Driver

This is instrumental guitar music. The pieces were recorded recently (2021-2023), except for two from 1986 - restless, impatient, relentless. Music composed (somewhat), improvised (more often) and then corralled into a form. I don't know how to do anything else. Could this collection have used a collaborator to untwist some of the knots tied in this material (e.g. an editor)? Yes. However, I am not particularly good (I am bad) at finding others who want to do that. The last person who contacted me seemed to evaporate after a few exchanges, and returned to his ham radio apparatus for less challenging company. I have known him for 45 years. I could take a hint? So what happens here is what I produced without the helpful and useful ears of anyone else, for good or ill.
My influences are players whose names will be uttered in reverential tones on documentaries and in record stores: Fripp (whose Guitar Craft encircled me for a number of years), Verlaine, D. Boon, Baiza, Ulmer, Branca (and his most famous pupils), Levene, Quine, Reed, Mcgeoch, Mclaughlin, and Beefheart's stable of starved, beaten long-suffering horses. Add to this the the names of others - equally gifted and more financially stable - whose styles pilfered as I learned how to make sounds: Jimi Hendrix, Rick Nielsen, Pete Townsend, Alex Lifeson, etc. You roll your eyes, so do they. Yes, I could take a hint.
Mostly it's just guitars, bass, drums. There are no loops. I prefer the agony of having to repeat playing something over and over until the fingers rebel. It doesn't take long. The drifts and lapses sometimes lead somewhere more interesting than a mechanically looped phrase would. I also love altered tunings. A few are represented here, some of which I would have to reverse engineer.
The pieces I recorded here simultaneously use the (mostly unadorned except for some grit) electric guitar as a purely compositional tool, and as a way to represent particular sensations visual and emotional. Hidden amongst the chattering incessant lines is the influence of non-musicians. I am indebted to the work left behind by U.G. Krishnamurti and Nisargadatta Maharaj. Somehow I take refuge in their no-refuge presentations.
The fact that this happened is because Jay Reeve is a champion, willing to use his time and resources to help me out. If there's any cohesion here it's thanks to Jay giving me a firm date to GET MY SHIT TOGETHER. Hats off to you, brother.
Barry Stock
November 11, 2023
credits
released December 7, 2023