Kaiser, Henry - Nostalgia For Infinity - Solo Antarctic Guitar (artist released professional CD-R)
SKU
Fractal NFI
"I have a great love for the feedback tape delay system that Terry Riley developed and named in the 1960’s: The Time Lag Accumulator. It is an amazingly expressive creative tool, and just one of the myriad of wonders that exploded from The San Francisco Tape Music Center. When Robert Fripp and Brian Eno later co-opted this twin Revox tape recorder technology and approach from Riley in 1973 - Fripp dubbed it Frippertronics - that co-opting kinda spoiled this simple long delay with feedback approach to solo guitar for me as form of public performance. While Fripp created some truly great guitar music with Riley’s methodology, he seemed to build a wall around the possibilities for other guitarists using those Terry Riley techniques, by creating a situation where anyone who employed Riley's methods without tipping their hat to the King Crimson bandleader was scorned. Despite this, I would sometime enjoy privately playing in this manner at home alone - but never in public. My gratitude for opening up that sonic world, goes 100% to Terry Riley. I seem to have been the first guitarist to use studio digital delays for this purpose in the mid-70’s; with the first digital looping on an album with 1978’s recordings of OUTSIDE PLEASURE and ALOHA. Most of my released long-form solos however have been in the completely different square-wave modulated delay approach that I discovered in the 70’s, seemingly independent of anyone else. My albums Everything Forever, A Rainbow for Riley, and Garden of Memory being my favorite releases in that style. Here on Nostalgia for Infinity are long form solos performed without the square wave modulation in the delay, and in more of a Terry Riley modality. Just one guitar live into a TC 2290 digital delay.
How did these solos come to be? A friendly practice that I learned from my #1 guitar hero Derek Bailey was to record guitar solos for my friends’ birthdays and give the music to them as single copy CDs. Generally, I would not save this music for myself. Here are 3 solos from 2006 that I recently discovered on an ancient hard drive. I share them with listeners now in 2017, as audio trance wallpaper. Probably they are best listened to while other tasks are being performed. The music was recorded live, soon after re-deployment from McMurdo Station, where I work as a scientific diver beneath the ice of the Ross Sea, in the US Antarctic Program. This particular music was particularly inspired my experiences working out on top of the sea ice, in those Austral Spring days that never end. Antarctic months where the sun never sets. That’s the nostalgic memory my guitar is improvising about here."- HK