Amplified Guitar

by Mat Ball

The art that I find most resonant often presents variation, decomposition, or struggle within an identified system or set of rules. So it is with my favorite record of the year, Montreal musician Mat Ball’s Amplified Guitar. Playing an instrument he built himself, Ball recorded each track in a single take. There are no overdubs or adornments—each piece is a dance between Ball’s mournful, blues-inflected playing and the amplifier that is projecting (and refracting) each note. As the album’s short trailer video makes clear, the dance between Ball and his amplifier is literal: at one point, he presses the head of the guitar into the amplifier; at another, he upends the instrument and drags its head across the concrete floor in swooping arcs to bend and extend its wails. Ball searches for feedback and, as it comes, he improvises a response. But it’s not an album of complete improvisation, as he returns to figures and themes in three interwoven “movements”: “To Catch Light,” “Within the Billow,” and “Steel Wound Arteries.” These waver between searching and searing, between towering masses of noise and the gentle strumming of individual notes.

I latched on to its melancholy when the album was released in July. As the year progressed, that emotional resonance deepened. Throughout the summer I thought, “This is my favorite guitar record since Alan Sparhawk’s Solo Guitar,” which was released in 2006 (Silber Records, Apple, Spotify). The connection, to me, is not only that the albums share a deadpan title, or that Sparhawk likewise offers a “second attempt” at the same melody, or the references to the blues. It’s that in both cases, especially when listening via headphones, it can feel like you’re in the center of a very large room that is vibrating with noise. No matter how massive the sound, there remains a sense of space—it is not claustrophobic, but rather a sound you can explore. It’s an atmosphere. I couldn’t shake the connection throughout the fall and toggled often between the two records. Then, in early November, Sparhawk’s wife and bandmate Mimi Parker died at age 55. Her early death not only affected how I heard the music they made together as Low, but also how I heard Ball’s record.

The other connection I keep making is to artist Christian Marclay’s 2000 video Guitar Drag (UbuWeb excerpt)—yet another piece with a deadpan title. That fourteen-minute work features a guitar being dragged along a Texas roadway behind a pickup truck that has an amplifier in its bed. It squeals and squelches as the guitar slides along the pavement or bumps over dry grass and gathers dead leaves. Another kind of improvisation, the work is a reference to the 1998 murder of James Byrd, Jr., at the hands of white supremacists. (At the outset, Marclay ties a rope around the guitar’s “neck.”) It is one of the most profound artworks I’ve experienced.

These connections, and others, take the plangent sound of Ball’s record and give it additional meaning for me. I’m grateful to Ball for making the album and to Vanessa Ague for the Pitchfork review that introduced me to it.