Saturday, September 09, 2006

If you are in New York next weekend

Philip Gayle is playing a show at the Downtown Music Gallery on Sunday Sept 17 at 6:00. He hasn't played out much lately as far as I know. I guess you could say this performance is "in support" of his CD The Mommy Row, but that was done in the studio with layers of overdubbing. This will be him and some guitars and waterphone, or something like that. Although there's obvious differences between this sort of live deal and what he can assemble in the studio, it's definitely the same voice.

The thing about Phil, well there's many things about Phil, but about his music is that he has a remarkable ability to extrapolate a universe of music from any single sound. One noise, generated however (with him the sources are always acoustic as are most of the manipulations), immediately suggests more and more sounds to him, and quickly they explode into polyphony and counterpoint. It doesn't matter what he uses to make the sound, although the fact is he has great guitar technique, which means that some of the options open to him involve things like being able to pick notes on a stringed instrument. And his technique never, ever devolves into something hackneyed.

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