$15 adv., $18 door. 8:00pm doors, music at 8:30pm. 21+
BASIC is a mind-meld between noted Philadelphia guitarist Chris Forsyth, Douglas McCombs (Tortoise), and Mikel Patrick Avery (Natural Information Society). "This Is BASIC", their debut album, is a complex and entrancing instrumental LP recasting forgotten scraps of guitar history into a moving mosaic of strings, skins and electronics. Taking inspiration (and their name) from the 1984 Robert Quine/Fred Maher album ("Basic"), BASIC forge a collaborative language from angular polyrhythms, pulsing baritone-guitar lines, and shimmering chorus-pedal washes (another stylistic nod, this time to the glistening post-punk of the Durutti Column and numerous 4AD bands). The trio is an improvisational swirl of disorienting electronics, hypnotic throb, and dense flanged-guitar harmonics: three unique voices spinning a complex conversation of textures and rhythms.
“...a scrappy and mystical historian…Chris Forsyth's music humanizes the element of control in rock classicism (and) turns it into a woolly but disciplined ritual.” - NY Times
“Chris Forsyth is one of rock’s most lyrical guitar improvisors,” - NPR Music
As one of experimental music's most influential guitarists, Bill Orcutt weaves looping melodic lines and angular attack into a dense, fissured landscape of American primitivism, outsider jazz, and a stripped-down re-envisioning of the possibilities of the guitar. Whether he’s playing his decrepit Kay acoustic or gutted electric Telecaster (both stripped of two of their strings, as has been Orcutt’s custom since 1985), Orcutt’s jagged sound is utterly unique and instantly recognizable, compared with equal frequency to avant-garde composers and rural bluesmen. The New York Times has called him a "powerful musician... a go-for-broke guitar improviser," and described his sound as "articulated sprays of arpeggiated chords and dissonance.”