R.Keenan Lawler2

R.Keenan Lawler is a musician and sound artist based in Louisville Kentucky. For over 25 years his musical journey has taken him from early experiments with reverb tanks,noise and tapedecks to all manner of avantgarde,"new" music,psychedelia,electro acoustic,drone,ethnic and sampler based work. Lawler is best known for developing a highly personal and exploratory language for the metal bodied resonator guitar which Baltimore's John Berdnt called "Cosmic, monolithic and deeply American. Indeed his work is informed by carnatic classical,Charles Ives, Albert Ayler, blues, minimalism and non western trance musics. Primarily a solo performer,he is also known for collborative work. The Keyhole II album he recorded with Pelt and metal worker Eric Clark is one of Pelt's most beautiful and memorable recordings. and His guitar playing is also heard on releases by Paul K,Jack Wright,My Morning Jacket and most visibily on Matmos The Civil War.He has collaborated or performed with a wide range of foward thinking musicians and mavericks including Rhys Chatham, John Butcher, Pelt, Eliott Sharp, Charalambides, Ignaz Schick/Perlonex, Matmos, Philip Samartzis, Valerio Cosi,Kaffe Matthews, Burning Star Core,Jason Kahn,Ut Gret,Thaniel Ion Lee,My Morning Jacket, Ed Wilcox ,Ramesh Srinivasan,Kevin Drumm,Craig Colorusso,David Watson, David First, Lukas Ligeti,Raoul Bjorkenheim,Arco Flute Foundation,Jack Wright,Eric Clark,John Berdnt,Neil Feather,Helena Espvall,Ian Nagoski,Thomas Ankersmit,Paul K and the Weathermen,Connor Bell,Andy Willis,John Brunner,The Golden Fleece,Spiral Joy Band,Ian Wadley, Alan Licht,Taksuya Nakatani,Tom Carter,Mike Tamburo,Dave Gross,Mike Bullock,Bhob Rainey,Chris Cooper,Red Fly Nation,Aaron Rosenblum, Joe Dutkiewicz,Meisha Feigin,Ben Vandermeer,Evergreen,Eric Carbonara and Joseph Suchy--------------------------------------Reviews---------- ------------------------------ Keenan Lawler - The Strange Tale of Eddy Westport (New American Folk Hero) Innovators can often be split into two categories, those who break with tradition out of frustration or anger, and those who do so more lovingly, simply looking to explore further a form that they respect. Keenan Lawler, thought his work on the resonator guitar would sound positively alien to most of his fellow Kentuckians, seems more a member of the latter group. The Louisville natives music is a clear descendent of rustic American folk and blues, though largely aberrant progeny, to be sure. The Strange Tale of Eddy Westport is Lawlers most recent release, a teaser, of sorts, for the two discs that will drop on the Music Fellowship label in future months. The three-track disc finds Lawler covering a surprising amount of ground in such a short time, though hearing him on record [sic] doesnt seem to showcase Lawlers arsenal of techniques as much as a live performance can. Still, The Old Fort and A Fork in Gardners Path are some nice slices of Lawlers own obscure Americana, the former more traditional in its dark, serpentine path, the latter a more fragmented collection of some of Lawlers more extended techniques. Goodbye Lisa Rose closes the disc with an abridged performance and humorous footnote, a closing that takes a turn from the levity underpinning the rest of the music. Lawlers just completed a tour with Mike Tamburo, a like-minded individual who runs New American Folk Hero, and should continue to be active with releases and a reissue coming soon. Its hard to view this release as much more than a small taste of whats to come, but thats no reason not to enjoy it. Adam Strohm Fake Jazz Keenan Lawler -"The Strange Tale of Eddy Westport"(New American Folk Hero) Keenan Lawler first came to my attention as a member of Keyhole, a quintet that also features Pelt and metal worker, Eric Clark. Their two albums on Eclipse come highly recommended for anyone interested in the ever-blurring gap between primitive folk and abstract improvisation. Solo, Lawler forges a deep sound portal via his National Steel resonator guitar, an instrument mostly associated with bluegrass and blues. And Lawler is definitely playing a kind of blues on The Strange Tale of Eddy Westport 3 CD-R -- even a kind of bluegrass -- but his measured fingerpicking is run through the filter of unorthodox string benders like Alan Licht, later John Fahey and Keith Rowe. His sound is primal and otherworldly, meditative and boundless, across three tracks of immersive plucks and drones. Lawler bridges the aforementioned gap between the most primitive American mountain music and modern day out jazz, and he does it live with no overdubs. Case in point: Goodbye Lisa Rose, 90 seconds of lamenting bow screech and spectral overtones that conjure a state of near-religious exaltation and uncertain malaise at the same time. An inspired take on so-called Americana music. 8/10 - Lee JacksonThere's some kind of voodoo going on here. Almost like the musical equivalent of spirit writing.The artist bends over his National Steel Resonator Guitar, the air thick and redolent of sandalwood and cedar.Slowly, the spirits come to him and coax his fingers into the appropriate positions to accept their instructions, his fingers acting as a sort of planchette.Without warning, the ghosts of Joseph Spence and Derek Bailey wrestle for the artist's attention.“If you two can’t play nice, I'm going to separate you,” the artist threatens.“Let’s get real gone for a change.”Bahamian, Piedmont, Free-Jazz, I’m pretty sure there was some Appalachian mountain dulcimer, and maybe even some Carnatic formulae (although I may be imagining that). I can't think of many guitarists who are able to combine so many styles and influences and make it sound so natural. Lawler is as difficult to categorize as John Fahey or James “Blood” Ulmer. Moreover, I'm pretty sure the acoustic guitar was never intended to produce some of the sounds he manages to coax from the strings."Music for the Bluegrass States" is not meditational. It demands, and deserves, the listener’s attention. Michael Steiger LEO weekly.***************************************************** ************Sound is pretty boring if you can't see and hear the color," guitarist R. Keenan Lawler said in a 2001 interview on the website Documentation and Discourse. The idea that music has to be abstract to entertain may seem counterintuitive, but Lawler's multi-hued work makes a convincing case. Bowing, strumming, and plucking his National Steel resonator (a booming 1920s guitar made of heavy nickel-plated brass), Lawler weaves probing instrumentals that can be raw, dissonant, and rambling, but are never boring.That's because Lawler's semi-structured approach to improvisation frees him up to explore a wide variety of sounds. On Music for the Bluegrass States, recorded live in his hometown of Louisville, Lawler travels through patches of melody, digressions into tangents, and spots of pure abstraction. His fertile playing, amplified by the resonator's ringing tone, evokes the avant-folk of John Fahey, the minimalist drone of Tony Conrad, the backwoods blues of Charley Patton, and the outsider chill of Jandek. But ultimately Lawler is a lone, restless artist charting his own crooked path to the outer reaches of guitar invention.Each stop along that road is engaging. Opener "That Train Has Left the Station" hammers at percussive chords until they bleed stray notes, while "Wall Climbing Spirit" knits off-tune plucks into a head-rush of strums. On the more tuneful side of the album's wide street, "1930"'s creaky picking creates its own 78-rpm hiss, and the rhythmic melody of "A Universal Rose"' sticks in the brain like a rustling scarecrow in a windy field.Two tracks fully unite Lawler's twin affinities for tunefulness and abstraction. His bowing on "One of These Days" starts like an orchestra warming up, then morphs into hoedown-worthy string-fiddling. Even more all-encompassing is "The Air on Mars Is Hard to Breathe, We'll Just Have to Stay in Louisville", a 26-minute piece that consumes long drones, intricate finger-picking, and a fervent passage in which mantra-like strums entrance Lawler into self-hypnosis. But then much of this album is introspective, like a conversation Lawler is having with himself. He has collaborated with many groups, from Pelt to My Morning Jacket to Matmos, but years of playing alone grants his music an inside-the-brain aura. (Even his contribution to Matmos' The Civil War was done alone, as he gave the group a recording of himself playing guitar inside a sewer pipe.)This lonely air gives Music for the Bluegrass States the feel of a journey, which is enhanced by pyramid-shaped sequencing. The shortest tracks come at the beginning and end, while "The Air on Mars…" occupies the middle, like a mount that Lawler scales to meet a sonic Maharishi. That trek may be the album's peak, but the conclusion is where Lawler encounters a real-life hero: free-jazz legend Albert Ayler. Covering Ayler's funereal "Our Prayer", Lawler replaces multi-horn blare with single-guitar solitude, turning a soulful ballad into a private elegy. It's a dazzling trick, but then all of Music for the Bluegrass States is enchanting-- proof that in Lawler's hands, a shiny guitar can become a magic wand.-Pitchfork.com-Marc Masters ************************************************************ ***Louisville guitarist R. Keenan Lawler music has been described as a "rain of mirrors",an apt summary of his singular treatments, whose chords seem constantly to be revolving and refracting catching the light unexpectedly.If its mirrors,these are distorted rusted mirrors through which ancient tradtions are affectionately bent and reinterpreted. The shorter tracks here examine,in the Fahey tradition,the potentially Eastern elements of fingerpicking."Wall Climbing Spirit",for example, is raga-like,in an increasingly agitated state,just at the point of departure."1930" is similarily caught in its own freeze frame,picking and picking at the same musical instance.Fine as the shorter tracks here are,listen to the lovingly applied "Our Prayer"- they're essentially flotsam to the albums centerpiece,the 26 minute,The Air On Mars Is Hard To Breathe,We'll Just Have To Stay In Louisville", which duly sets forth down the slipway,with a great foghorn of a drone before paddling into the open seas,free of bearings,increasingly excited by the prospect of the horizon.You sense that Lawler's music is appreciated even better live,where you can see what he does and the devices with which he achieves it-a case of cause being as important as effect. David Stubbs The Wire **************************Been waiting for some time for a high-profile collection of work from this consistently mind-blowing tho woefully under-documented steel guitar stylist and this looks to be the very bastard I've long been counting on. Lawler has worked with a bunch of interesting players over the years - most notably Pelt and Charalambides - but none of that material has really hinted at the kind of majesterial force his solo playing is capable of harnessing. He plays a metal-bodied resonator guitar and takes full advantage of the kinda scrabble potential that the instrument inevitably suggests, working iconoclastic American melodies and drones into clattering, rough-sawn shapes that have as much to do with Albert Ayler and Harry Partch as they do Blind Willie Johnson and Ry Cooder. This set features a clutch of original compositions as well as a beautifully faithful transcription of Donald Ayler's "Our Prayer" and works as the perfect introduction to a major new American string-thinker. Highly recommended--David Keenan= Volcanic Tongue *********************************Genius is not the word, since it basically means little due to overuse, but Music for Bluegrass States will have you humping for hyperbolic greenery to describe it. Accompanying himself on a National Steel Resonator Guitar, Lawler explores the inner world of delta blues and bluegrass as few have. These seven instrumentals cover a psychic history that runs from free jazz and Robert Johnson, Satie to Duchamp. His absorption of traditional finger-picking into his avant-garde chord structures and improvs is frightening and breath-taking. So overwhelming and riveting is “The Air on Mars is Hard to Breathe; We’ll Just Have to Stay In Louisville” is the fastest 25 minute song you’ll ever hear. There is so much to absorb, it flies by, leaving you in a trance. Other tracks, like “1930 , or “Our Prayer”, don’t so much channel Fahey, Kottke, Richard Leo Johnson, but challenge them to keep up. Buy this and see if I’m not leaping into a hype grave with that sentence. I don’t think so. This is a truly menacing and holy as a white bluesman as has been. Mike Wood -Music Emissions ********************There’s more to Kentucky than the Colonel’s famous recipe, and armed with his trademark Resonator guitar R. Keenan Lawler (who was last spotted on the ‘Strands Formally Braided’ CD on Music Fellowship) takes steps in re-branding the bluegrass states for us modern avant-garde heads. Taking a similar route to guitar god John Fahey and the Fahey for our modern age Jack Rose, Lawler wrestles with Bluegrass structures, tearing them apart and bending them into shape as if they were made of thin wire. You might get the hint of a traditional structure for a moment and then we’re back into tangled abstraction, allowing Lawler the space he needs to show off his dextrous fingerpicking. I can’t say I’ve heard Americana interpreted in this way before, there’s something undeniably dark and foreboding about Lawler’s style, which gives his America a quality usually pushed way into the background. A brave move and one which certainly pays off as he treads the line between Tony Conrad’s wild experimentalism and John Fahey’s folk reverence. A bizarre and beautiful statement from a unique voice in American music. Boomkat****************************************************S trange to think that, in the space of a little over 10 years, a record collector from Takoma Park, Maryland, would go from being an overweight dude in wayfarers who’d pawned his guitar for gas station pistachio money to an avatar of the American avant-garde. These images, of course, come from the stories told about the man in the steady stream of articles that began to appear in the mid-’90s, stories already embedded in John Fahey’s ‘forgotten figurehead’ status. Despite the fact that his CV extends back 25 years, at this point any discussion of R. Keenan Lawler’s work, for better or worse, has to pass through the pillars of innovative guitar wrangling: Fahey and Derek Bailey. While Music for the Bluegrass States’ seven tracks are in explicit dialogue with Bailey’s crack jazz serialist MO and Fahey’s bluegrass ragas, the space these artists open up for Lawler to explore ends up being much more significant than the space they occupy within his language.As the album art makes clear, the album is deeply rooted in place. The clever and subtle mise-en-abîme of the cover photo – which depicts a corner in one of Louisville’s bohemian neighborhoods – suggests what the music bears out: the album is both an attempt at mapping something both incredibly specific and yet somehow ubiquitous. In this case, it’s a run through the sonic palette of bluegrass music that lands us in the liminal zone between the urban, the rural, and the suburban, between avant-garde ‘incoherence’ and the comfort of traditional music.Recorded live in Louisville in 2006, the album manifests as a series of solo exercises on the steel-string resonator guitar central to traditional bluegrass. Ironically, Lawler's playing style on a guitar named for the depth and clarity of its tone revolves around the metallic, truncated tone of a string buzzing against the fretboard. These on-purpose mistakes suggest more than they actually articulate, and on tracks like "A Universal Rose,” Lawler manages to construct something both as sturdy as James Blackshaw's sprawling, burnished 12-string arabesques and as subtly colored as Fahey’s fake American anthropology. Riding as it does on the interplay between vibration and pattern, Lawler’s guitar evokes a sense of both the sprawling suburban spaces glimpsed from the freeway and the claustrophobic dioramas of American history, overpopulated with ghosts and half-occluded histories.Lawler’s album is paced carefully so that each of the first three tracks is longer than the last, while each of the album’s final three tracks is shorter than the previous. The sine-wave sequencing of the album feels less like the kind of pathos-filled avant-hillbilly epic you might expect and more like a humid stroll through the ’burbs. These tracks can’t help but feel like both warm-ups/cool downs and preliminary studies/reworkings of the album’s centerpiece, the 26-minute “The Air on Mars Is Hard to Breathe, We’ll Just Have to Stay in Louisville.” The track is both heavy and deliberate, but shies away from turgidity thanks to Lawler’s most fascinating quality: the ability to conjure tones, shades, and an uncanny amount of depth from squelched notes. The song opens with a limpid purple drone as Lawler draws a bow across his guitar’s neck, but before Tony Conrad comparisons kick in, he starts knocking out notes that, while they aren’t fully voiced, have the kind of transitory intensity of a clumsy watercolor. The formal possibilities of Lawler’s instrument play a major role in determining the album’s symmetry. Album opener “That Train Has Already Left the Station,” is probably Music for the Bluegrass States’ prickliest, with its languorous, doubled notes that fan out around the edges into full spectrums, like the two rainbows of the cover photo.The closest Lawler comes to Fahey is in the latter part of “1930,” which begins with high lonesome notes that slightly wince under the pressure of his slide, then slowly crystallize into a freewheeling cascade of figures. But while Fahey’s phraseology allowed each passage to stretch out, breathe, and merge into the next, the faster parts of Lawler’s playing reveal figures that emerge from other figures, melodies that aren’t quite, because they occupy both the negative and positive space of the song. Much could be written about this clamoring polyphony in the context of bluegrass music’s own gnarled history or the red state/blue state divide that the album’s title indirectly references, but one gets the feeling that Lawler’s not too big on words. Just colors. By Brandon Bussolini- Dustedmagazine.com