Description: Featuring Jim McAuley on classical, steel-string, 12-string & slide acoustic guitars and dobro. LA-based guitarist Jim McAuley is a rare musician who bridges the gap between the extreme improvisations of Derek Bailey & Fred Frith and the more roots-oriented work of John Fahey & Leo Kottke. Considering Mr. McAuley has been playing for several decades, he has less than a half dozen discs out. He is member of the Acoustic Guitar Trio with Rod Poole & Nels Cline and has a superb duos 2 CD set (on Drip Audio) with Nels & Alex Cline, Leroy Jenkins and Ken Filiano. As far as I can tell this is McAuley’s second solo offering, his first being Gongfarmer 18 on Nine Winds.
‘Gongfarmer 36′ is a collection of solo pieces for a half dozen different acoustic guitars, some with preparations and a dobro. Some live, some studio, some select out-takes from previous sessions, all improvised. Each piece involves a different approach or strategy. This music is unique and sounds in-between categories. “Second Blooming” is blends intense free, near-flamenco flourishes with furiously paced waves of lines. “Blues for John Carter” (the late legendary clarinet giant) is an intense, harrowing dervish with a number of naked blues licks that evoke the slow dance of ghosts in a lonely graveyard. “Another November Night” is a stark, dark, hypnotic piece for fragile, bent strings altered with a tuning fork. Beyond haunting, scary actually. After listening closely to this disc a few times, I realize that the way one touches or caresses the strings makes the sound different, from ultra subtle to explosive and everything in between. Fragments of certain phrases have different effects on the listener and change depending on our mood or closeness of concentration. “Una Lunga Canzone” involves a series of related melodies or short scenes which are connected subliminally. “Joy Buzzer” features buzzing strings played or muted percussively. It is more about the texture of the sound that effects us. “The Eyes of Buddha” is for 12-string with a slide and it is an extraordinary work. McAuley gets the 12-string to sound like a harpsichord adding an elegant quality to an already mesmerizing epic. There have been dozens of solo acoustic discs released over the past decade (Jack Rose, James Blackshaw & Peter Walker). This disc should be placed near the top of that list! – Bruce Lee Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery
Downtown Music Gallery talks about Gongfarmer 36
Bruce Lee Gallanter