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Joined:
December 2002
Posts: 584
Location: atlanta | [Note to OFC--Popcritic loves it when Kaki says something nice about him.]
Source:
http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=10140
King Shaping Up To Be Queen Of The Folk Set
By Alexander Varty
Vancouver, B. C.
When Kaki King arrived at Jericho Beach Park last July, she was a relative unknown, recognized only by obsessive readers of guitar magazines. But by the time the 2004 Vancouver Folk Music Festival ended its three-day run, the diminutive musician was a one-woman buzz band—and she sounded like a band, too.
Tapping out house- and rap-derived beats on the body of her guitar, coaxing deep bass tones from various alternative tunings, and fretting with both hands to achieve a complex, polyrhythmic web of sound, King did the work of three or four players. Like Michael Hedges and Leo Kottke before her, King is in the process of redefining the possibilities of the acoustic guitar through her remarkable and unorthodox technical abilities.
But physical dexterity is not all she’s about, as her new CD, Legs to Make Us Longer, amply demonstrates. While its bare-bones predecessor, Everybody Loves You, focused on her unaccompanied virtuosity, the new disc gives King a chance to show off her compositional skills and features input from an array of outside musicians, including Living Colour drummer Will Calhoun and avant-garde cello star Erik Friedlander. The guitarist’s jaw-dropping fingerstyle work remains intact, but this time around it’s the compositions that grab your attention first.
On Legs to Make Us Longer, King benefited from the attention of producer David Torn, best known for his work with one of the younger musician’s idols, David Bowie. What’s not clear is if the two will work again; judging by King’s cautious response to that question, the sessions were not always easy.
"It was interesting," she says, reached on her tour manager’s cellphone at a Brattleboro, Vermont, pit stop. She sounds mildly amused, and also a little bit like she’s considering a scientific experiment involving insect parts. "We come from two different schools of thought on guitar: I’m sort of a purist and I really want to hear the guitar, and he’s all about electronics and treating the guitar sound to make it different. And so we sort of had to meet somewhere in the middle—and it was really necessary and good for us to do that, for the record."
Torn did introduce her to a few new concepts, however, and also to a new instrument: the guitar-koto, a hybrid device that allows the user to bend strings behind the bridge as on an Asian zither. It’s what King’s playing on the untitled bonus track at the end of Legs to Make Us Longer, and its immediately familiar yet quite unidentifiable sound is a nice encapsulation of her aim for the disc. Legs builds on Everybody’s basics, but it finds King stretching her limbs in several different directions. She sings, for instance, on "My Insect Life", and elsewhere plays lap steel and electric guitar for the first time on disc. And judging from her description of the gear that she’s bringing with her on the road, she’s continuing to explore different guitar-related voices.
"My plan right now, if I can pull it off, is to bring my Adamas acoustic guitar, my old workhorse," she reports. "But I’m also going to bring an electric baritone guitar, and a lap steel, and a nylon-string guitar. I’m also in the process of starting to write a lot of new music, so there’ll be a lot of improvisation as well."
In fact, when King plays the Yale
http://www.theyale.ca/calendar.cfm
on Monday (May 16),she’ll begin the evening with a fully improvised piece, something she plans to do on each stop of her current tour. Otherwise, she’s looking forward to delving more fully into composition, a process hinted at on such Legs to Make Us Longer tracks as the string quartet–assisted "Doing the Wrong Thing" and the complex, episodic "All the Landslides Birds Have Seen Since the Beginning of the World" (named, by the way, after an enigmatic comment from her guitar-playing father—"my dad is awesome," the 25-year-old relates).
"It’s a very odd stage for me, because I’ve played guitar my entire life, I know how to write for guitar, and now I’m not hearing it anymore," King says. "I don’t want to do another solo guitar record. Obviously guitar is my instrument and obviously it’ll be the strongest force in whatever I do, but I kind of want to put my musicianship to the test and just see what else I can come up with. But no one can predict these things: I’ll say, ‘Oh, yeah, I want to write a great record that sounds like Tortoise,’ and then I’ll come back with guitar and string quartet. That’s just how it is." Such are the pressures of being an original, but I don’t think King would have it any other way.
Copyright 2005
http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=121 | |
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Joined:
March 2005
Posts: 417
Location: Cicero, NY | Props to the old man - gotta love that. Exactly how do you not burst when you read that? | |
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Joined:
May 2003
Posts: 4389
Location: Capital District, NY, USA Minor Outlying Islands | My gallery has pic of the guitar koto. The song which features it is really poetic. She said her manager made it. The guitar-koto, not the song. | |
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"the old workhorse"