The Face of Solo Guitar Is Changing. Itâs About Time.
Since the heyday of John Fahey, the genre has been seen as the province of white men. A new generation of diverse players is rapidly changing that.
Yasmin Williams, one of the countryâs most imaginative young solo guitarists, makes music that represents a break with the formâs stoic traditions.Credit.Amr Alfiky/The New York Times
By Grayson Haver Currin
April 28, 2021Updated 1:39 p.m. ET
Before Yasmin Williams became a teenager, she found her perfect sport: âGuitar Hero,â the dizzying video game where aging rock staples enjoyed an unlikely second life through players wielding plastic controllers fashioned after vintage Gibsons.
The cover of
Our Hands Against the Dusk shows a photo of two hands intertwined. One of these hands belongs to the composer and audiovisual artist Rachika Nayar, and the other is the hands of one of her friends. The image alludes to the deeply interpersonal experiences that colored the four years Nayar took writing this album. While electronic/ambient genres may seem, in some artists’ hands, as cold and clinical, Nayar’s music stems from deeply personal experiences and encounters. The music reflects that in many ways.
Our Hands Against the Dusk (the title taken from a Richard Jackson poem) manages, quite effectively, to combine sharp edges with soothing warmth. For every metallic glitch, a sustained, welcoming chord envelops the listener. Much of the music derives from Nayar’s guitar playing, which is the sonic linchpin here. On the opening track, “The Trembling of Glass”, guitar notes tap away insistently, not unlike a keyboard, sonically manipulated while ethereal chord
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For Rachika Nayar, the key to her artistic life lay in the space between, and the first step forward was to reach outside of traditional methods of music-making. “Both instrumental playing and digital production felt limited to me in expressing only singular facets of my emotional life,” she says. “So I eventually began combining them, mutating my guitar playing with particular electronic methods. In that way, experimental and ambient feel not only like homes, but also like places where I can begin to meld my different sides together or start deconstructing genre boundaries.” This limitlessness is strewn across Nayar’s astounding debut album,
Daryl Worthington
, March 4th, 2021 09:12
From restaurant themed sound art to saz led psych jams and pogoing black metal, Daryl Worthington finds the tape scene continues to shine a light throughout these weird days
A/C Repair School is the Brazilian duo of Rafael de Toledo Pedroso and Carolina Simionato (who also makes music as Soft Verges), and on new album Órfãs, they produce something remarkably lucid from the barest instrumentation. Their songs deal with abandonment (the album’s title translates to orphans), and not just in the lyrics – it’s inscribed into the very music itself. Simionato’s vocals on ‘bom demais pra ser mentira’ have a torch song quality, but pulled into the fuzz it feels fragile and isolated – a love song broadcast into the void.