Love the almost piano-like fretless. - as you may know, the one thing about fretless guitar is that there is no sustain in the upper reaches - it's like pizzicato violin. Probably why fretless guitar is not as popular as fretless bass.
I see on Youtube that some fretless guitar specialists are using glass fretboards to overcome this, but they sound like bottleneck! There's one guy, Ned Emett, I think, who actually plays a resonator guitar with a glass fretless fingerboard. But close your eyes and he may as well be playing bottleneck [he's good though].
Yea, I had a fretless I made out of a superstrat copy in the stone age. A friend of mine used it far more than I did, so I gave it to him when I left the city.
Those are some magical revolving sparkles in the background.
Those are guitar synth and theremin synth parts that I panned and then submerged with reverb. Some parts were transposed up high and then the very upper EQ reaches boosted, but then made ghostly by reverb
Love the texture
Will you have to rent another flat soon for your instruments?
Yeah - I need to sell a few off that I don't use any more! I have wanted a fretless guitar for a while. My whole thinking tends towards slide guitar, lap steel, theremin and therefore fretless - that trajectory. Of course, it's good to play with frets after a fretless session - but fretless gets you close to the chthonic roots of the instrument. Feels quite African, too.
nice transition. At that point you hear the drone - I pared back to the first tracks - used some tempo shifts - indeed there is confluence of diminuendo and accelerando around these points
oh, that sctarch and static. i feel so at home.
: I'm so glad you picked up on that! That was a guitar through the Zvex Fuzz Probe - I needed a change of texture there and that did it. Rather than try to play something I just let the pedal make a sound - it presents a strange picture to the mind's eye - like a frayed out arachnid toasted by the sun.
i see the fire light dance upon the night fronds. i hear the 'mbira.
Yes! I had Africa in mind on this, very much. I began in India but got pulled to Africa with an erotic yearning for a Nubian Niobe
such texture and dimensionn - it began with a kind of sitarish drone - two guitars setting that up with the 5 string bass improvising. Perhaps I should have stopped there! As I added more and more guitars, drum machine, theremin etc., I lost that drone aspect but began to get that vaster impasto canvas. As usual, panning and reverb are great helps to making that vastness appear.
what a thrilling trip... just great!!!
Lovely chromatic mousesteps here!: using fretless guitar for the first time here.
Sinuous interwoven invocatory sounds...whole thing began as a drone with Eastern tinges - added more threads, but they tended to float on the stream created by the mostly obscured drone
The bass playing is sublime, Bill and the theremin so evocative
- it's a new bass - another 5 string, but a Yamaha - it's got a long scale like a jazz bass, so best of both worlds - some of the theremin is guitar - kind of blended together
lyrics
Sleeping Niobe
Living at different times, in different dimensions,
It wasn’t possible – even for a space traveller – to make contact with Niobe.
And yet her ebon form pressed heavily against my pale thoughts.
So much so, that – taking a leaf from the master of the mystic arts,
I did insinuate myself into her heady dreams.
credits
from Light Worship,
released September 23, 2017
Bill Boethius, guitars, theremin, fx, bass and drums.
Straddling the threshold between studio performance and digital technique; the NYC artist applies "fake jazz" principles to synthpop. Bandcamp New & Notable May 2, 2024
A collection of tracks from the singer and multi-disciplinary artist's 111 collaboration series, featuring KMRU, Laraaji, and others. Bandcamp New & Notable Apr 25, 2024
