KEITH ROWE THE ROOM (ERSTWHILE RECORDS)
Rowe and Connors operate in different spheres and have never collaborated–the American-born Connors is basically a blues guitarist playing to an indie-rock underground whose interest in him has waxed and waned, and Rowe, as a founding member of AMM, is a key progenitor of English free improvisation. But their paths have crossed occasionally, most recently when they shared a bill at the Rothko Chapel on June 1. Each has since released a solo record, and though only Rowe’s directly addresses Rothko’s art, both albums venture into its emotional territory.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Connors, 57, who’s also released albums under the names Guitar Roberts and Loren Mazzacane, traffics in traditional guitar sounds and familiar idioms–not just blues but also folk and even experimental jazz. Solo albums make up the bulk of his discography, and his most successful collaborators–guitarists Alan Licht and Jim O’Rourke, bassist Darin Gray–have adopted self-effacing roles, framing and reframing his playing rather than competing with it. He made many of his early records alone in his studio, playing to his own paintings, and self-released them in tiny pressings.
He found the beginning of an answer in the work of another painter, abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. Not only did Pollock give up brushwork, instead dripping and smearing paint, he worked on a canvas laid flat on the floor–and Rowe adopted an analogous technique, laying his guitar on a tabletop and coaxing from it a confounding variety of hums, scrapes, and whistles. He prepares its strings with all manner of hardware–screwdrivers, alligator clips, lengths of chain, Brillo pads–and bows, plucks, or otherwise vibrates them, sometimes amplifying the instrument’s body with contact mikes. He’s never let familiarity dilute his unique relationship with the guitar: across more than 40 years of playing, both in AMM and more recently with electronically oriented improvisers, some of whom weren’t yet born when he started, he’s made it a point to find his sounds in performance, not in rehearsal. In fact he says he doesn’t even take his guitar out of its case except at gigs, unless he’s rewiring the pickups–he quite literally practices his art in public. Rowe’s collaborations, too, whether harmonious or contentious, rigorously resist the usual jazz-derived solo-background relationship in favor of more collective orientations.
While The Room meditates on Rothko’s hidden terror, Connors’s The Hymn of the North Star seems to show how that kind of feeling can be outlasted. This is a remarkable artistic statement for Connors, especially considering the extreme bleakness of many of his previous releases and the trials he’s been enduring in his own life. He’d been recording for nearly 15 years and his musical career was just starting to take off when he learned he had Parkinson’s. Though he seemed to put out a record every month or two in the late 90s, even at that peak he never sold many, and since then his output has slowed down drastically–besides The Hymn of the North Star, released August 22 in an LP-only edition of 499, the only thing he’s put out under his name this year is a CD-R of a seven-year-old gig with poet Steve Dalachinsky. As if parkinsonism weren’t enough, he broke his wrist badly in 2004–he often has to wear a brace when he isn’t playing–and then fractured his hip last fall. But he’s continued to gig, even when it’s meant he needed to use a walker to take the stage. “I take pills all day long,” he said in an interview last year, “and if they’re working, there’s no effect on my playing.”
