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As much as i find Keith Rowe inspiring and instrumental to my experimental tendencies i find his recent work of the last ten or so years somewhat meandering and boring, to me his best work was with AMM (60's thru the 90's, he broke away from AMM in the 70's) and within the solo album he made on Matchless where he actually made "sound" and the use of "silence" (in the John Cage-ian sense) work together perfectly, there are a few recordings on Erstwhile that are good but i don't feel compelled to go back to any of them for multiple listens.
Extended technique on the guitar is all well and good but when it comes down to the light sound washes of a 40 to 50 minute recording of what is perceived as only a portable electric fan blowing gently on the pickups, it borders on self indulgance and that is the problem i see with alot of what exists among the elitest in the free improv community.
Don't be fooled as I find Rowe to be in abit of a contradiction as it is led to believe that he completely strayed away from traditional and technical guitar technique in the 60's... this is not true as he played some very straight forward guitar licks (however in a very improvisational way) in a short lived version of a group called Almagam at some point in the 70's, I have an album of Almagam where he definitly and very noticably is playing some straight forward guitar action much in a way that is a fusion of John McLaughlin and Jimi Hendrix to say the least.
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