CD Recommendation: Kaki King…The Guitar is A Shapeshifter

KAKI KINGArtist: KAKI KING
Title: The Neck Is The Bridge To The Body
Label: Short Stuff Records
Genre: acoustic experimental guitar
Release date: March 3, 2015

Kaki King’s groundbreaking new work, The Neck Is A Bridge To The Body, sees the renowned guitarist/composer joining forces with visual performance pioneers Glowing Pictures to construct an innovative multi-media production in which The Guitar itself takes centerstage. The Neck Is A Bridge To The Body debuted at Brooklyn’s BRIC House Ballroom in March 2014, and will tour extensively in 2015. An album featuring the music from the show will also be released in 2015.

The Neck Is A Bridge To The Body lays bare The Guitar’s inner life and protean power, its incalculable possibility and perpetual presence in our deepest unconscious. The hour-long production places the focus directly on The Guitar itself, the Instrument serving as an ontological tabula rasa in a creation myth unlike any other ever presented.

King and Glowing Pictures – known for their work with such artists as Animal Collective, David Byrne & Brian Eno, Beastie Boys, and TV On The Radio – have reconceived The Guitar as a screen for a remarkable range of new digital projections. Luminous visions of genesis and death, unexpected textures and skins, are cast onto a Ovation Adamas 1581-KK Kaki King Signature 6-String Acoustic guitar customized specifically for this production. The Guitar gradually evolves, taking on a living, breathing existence of its own, complete with friends, family, and complex skeletal, muscular and nervous systems. Provocative and moving, surprising and beautiful, The Neck Is A Bridge To The Body is Kaki King at her visionary best, as ever deconstructing and redefining the role of solo instrumental artist though virtuoso technique, outsized imagination, and boundless humanity.

“The Guitar is a shapeshifter,” King says, “something that plays all types of music and really fills all kinds of roles. It’s not always the six-string guitar that we all know and love. I’ve been playing guitar for more than 30 years. It’s who I am and if anything, this project has made me even more familiar with it.”

Credits

Executive Producers: Mirabai Bush, Evan Thayer, Swiss Picks, Miika Haapala
Produced by D. James Goodwin.
Mixed by D James Goodwin @ The Isokon, Woodstock, NY
Engineered by D. James Goodwin and Jim Bertini at Galaxy Smith Studios, Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Mastered by Scott Hull @ Masterdisk, NYC.
Kaki King, guitars and drums and things
Dan Brantigan, Trumpet on ‘Anthropomorph’
ETHEL (Dorothy Lawson, cello, Ralph Farris, viola, Tema Watstein, violin, Kip Jones, violin) Strings on Trying to Speak I and Trying to Speak II
All songs written by Kaki King for Kaki King Music (BMI)
String arrangements by Kaki King