Keith Rowe

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Keith Rowe (born March 16, 1940 in Plymouth UK) is a British free improvisation guitarist.

Rowe is a founding member of AMM (though in 2004 he quit that group for the second time) and M.I.M.E.O. He trained as a visual artist, and Rowe's paintings--often reminsicent of Pop Art--have been featured on several of his own albums. After years of relative obscurity, Rowe has achieved a level of notoriety, and since the late 1990s as kept up a busy recording and touring schedule; many of his recordings have been released by Erstwhile Records.

Biography

Rowe began his career playing jazz in the early 1960's--notably with Mike Westbrook--but grew tired of what he considered the form's limitations. Rowe gradually expanded into free jazz and free improvisation, eventually abandoning conventional guitar technique.

This change in his approach to guitar, Rowe reports, was partly inspired by a teacher in one of his painting courses who told him, "Rowe, you cannot paint a Caravaggio. Only Caravaggio can paint Caravaggio." Rowe reports that after considering this idea from a musical perspective, "trying to play guitar like Jim Hall seemed quite wrong." For several years Rowe contemplated how to reinvent his approach to the guitar, again finding inspiration in visual art, namely, American painter Jackson Pollock, who abandoned traditional painting methods to forge his own style. "How could I abandon the technique? Lay the guitar flat!"[link]

Rowe developed various prepared guitar techniques: placing the guitar flat on a table and manipulating the strings, body and pickups in unorthodox ways to produce sounds described as dark, brooding, compelling, expansive and alien. He has been known to employ objects such as a library card, rubber eraser, springs, hand-held electric fans, alligator clips, and common office supplies in playing the guitar. A January, 1997 feature in Guitar Player magazine described a Rowe performance as "resemble a surgeon operating on a patient." Rowe sometimes incorporates live radio broadcasts into his performances, including shortwave radio and number stations (the guitar's pickups will also pick up radio signals, and broadcast them through the amplifier).

Amm-mate percussionist Eddie Prevost reports that Rowe has "an uncanny touch on the wireless switch", able to find radio broadcasts which seem to blend ideally with, or offer startling commentary on, the music. (Prevost, 18). On AMMMusic, towards the end of the cacophonous "Ailantus Glandolusa", a speaker announces via radio that "We cannot preserve the normal music." Prevost writes that during an AMM performance in Istanbul, Rowe located and integrated a radio broadcast of "the pious intonation of a male Turkish voice. AMM of course, had absolutely no idea what the material was. Later, it was complimented upon the judicious way that verses from The Koran had been introduced into the performance, and the respectful way they had been treated!" (Prevost, 18)

Some accounts report that Rowe's guitar technique was an influence on Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett: "Taking his cues from experimental guitarist Keith Rowe of AMM, Barrett strived to push his music farther and farther out into the zone of complete abstraction." [link]

Sources

Edwin Prevost; No Sound Is Innocent: AMM and the Practice of Self-Invention--Meta-Musical Narratives, Essays Copula, 1995; ISBN 09525449204

External links

Discography, links, mp3 samples: [link]
[Rowe discusses his use of radio]
A 2001 Interview [link]

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