Support
Looper's Delight
|
Support |
|
|
Please pardon the spam. My CD has gotten another review. This time from my old home town rag 800 miles away. Josef Woodard, Santa Barbara Independent, 9.13-20.01 "Ted Killian is a nice enough fellow. Family man, mild-mannered, well-versed in the manipulation of ones and zeroes, PDFs and digital delay loops. Those who-knew-him-when as a local, and the graphic design point man at the Seymour Duncan compound in Goleta, knew him as a kindly sort who was missed when he packed up the clan and moved to the friendlier real estate climes of Oregon a few years ago. And then there is his alter artistic ego, also kindly, but also restless and wild. Killian is an electric guitar adventurer who may finally get some of the attention he deserves, having finally released his debut CD, Flux Aeterna, on the pfMENTUM label, run by his old friend and comrade, Santa Barbaran new-jazz maestro, Jeff Kaiser (www.pfmentum.com). A beautiful, raucous, and ethereal maze of sounds both physical and digital, and mostly conjured with guitars, Killian obviously ignored the advice of anyone who might have suggested “don't try this at home.” What has come out of his garage, and his brain, is a mutant DIY jewel. Experimental, yes. Accessible, too, in the way that mad guitar playing in the post-Hendrix era has embedded itself in the collective ear. Some may have caught Killian’s very occasional live appearances, in Santa Barbara and Ventura, in which he appeared entangled in wires and chains of effects. To set up kinetic musical canvas situations, Killian would deploy looping devices, including the mythical antique, the Electro-Harmonix 16-second digital delay unit, and sound-altering devices such as a ring modulator and mondo-distortion pressed into the service of grace. As heard on the opening track, “Hubble,” Killian doesn't spare the piercing solo guitar statements, the epic rock gesture that sounds loud no matter what volume you've dialed up. But often, those sweeping lines are laid atop surprisingly delicate, layered backdrops, as on “Cauterant Baptism,” or the languid distorto-toned musing drifting over “Recurvate Plaint.” “Leaving Medford” is an Oregonian-specific play on the song “Leaving Memphis,” but the vibe here is industrial and a touch foreboding, and a splinkety energy bubbles beneath the textural demolition derby that is “Reverse Logic.” But tenderness and subtlety hover about the proceedings, too. “Nocturnal Interstices” is an ambient collage of soaring tones and happily elusive structure. “Convocation Solitaire” is a sweet dream of a loop-happy tone poem, somewhat reminiscent of Bill Frisell’s first album. The title cut closes the album with its underwater-sounding arpeggios and unruly rock phrases, all dressed up in feedback and tattered timbral garb. The nice guy, the artist, the looper, and the rock riffster walk into a bar . . . and a church. For anyone wondering about the painterly expressive potential of the electric guitar, this is one prime example. One hears influential strains of artful gadget-tweakers David Torn and Robert Fripp here, but Killian is also onto something that is uniquely his own. This is the work of an open-minded, dogma-resistant experimentalist in a rock guitarphile’s body." MP3s available at: http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/138/ted_killian.html CDs for sale at: http://www.pfmentum.com/catalog.html