I am just finishing up a solo electric guitar album. During the process, I naturally dialed up some of the solo guitar records that caught my attention over the years. Today we're going to visit one of the more forgotten attempts, even if its progenitor is one of the better known of the guitarists I listened to.
There are several obvious solo electric guitar records: Neil Young's Dead Man, Sonny Sharrock's Guitar, Fred Frith's Guitar Solos, various electric guitar experiments in late period John Fahey, any one of a handful of Derek Bailey odysseys, etc. Of all the guitarists I listened, Pat Metheny is the highest profile (save Neil Young, of course). Yet, 1994's Zero Tolerance for Silence sunk almost as immediately as it surfaced, an anathema to both the hardcore fans of Metheny's light, cerebral jazz, and the growing legion of guitar noise aficionados spawned by the 80s NYC downtown scene. Way too noisy for Metheny's mainstream crowd, lacking of the extended techniques obsessed over by the new noise heads, Zero Tolerance fell into the cracks between.
Zero Tolerance is fairly simple: solid body electric guitar, humbucking pickups, high gain amp; no effects, no feedback, no oddball tunings, no "tabletop guitar" techniques . . . just Metheny shredding atonal improvs with his multi-tracked self. Technically, it's all rather straightforward, but the cumulative effect was compared by some to Lou Reed's notorious Metal Machine Music (though not by anyone who has actually listened to both records). It's understandable that Metheny's crowd wouldn't cotton to his self-described "2-dimensional" foray, but in spite of Thurston Moore's endorsement, it didn't catch on with the avant improv crowd either.
When this record came out, I was eight years into my avocation as a noise guitarist, living in Bloomington and working with two noisy rock improvising outfits, The Belgian Waffles! and The Catkillers, and many other inspiring friends and musicians, some of whom I still work with to this day. Like pretty much everyone else, I was at a loss on this one: in spite of the comparisons to Metal Machine Music, a record I was (and am) quite fond of, it very clearly was not trying to achieve the same thing. There were no kaleidoscopic phantoms hiding in the sheets of noise, there was no annihilation of space like the burning of the oxygen in the air. Though almost as noisy at points as MMM, it never loses its pointillist articulation: unlike pretty much everything I was listening to at the time, you could easily imagine this scored and accurately reproduced by an acoustic string quartet. Noisy as it was, it had none of the touchpoints I looked for, no refusal of music as music, no refusal of guitar as guitar. And yet, I found it compelling, though perhaps not compelling enough to listen to on a regular basis.
25 years later, I am starting to get more of a vocabulary to deal with ZTFS. After years of neglect, I pulled it back out and loaded it into my changer with 5 other guitar discs. In the intervening time, I have delved deep into classical, avant garde and otherwise, as well as a lot of free improv with acoustic roots. Still, it doesn't quite grab me by the throat: it feels sterile - something that is perhaps intentional, as evidenced by Metheny's characterization of the music as "2 dimensional" - and tends to live in an uncomfortable abstract zone that fails in the way that many Jackson Pollock paintings fail. As far as my own interests go, I am not and never will be interested in the primarily technical problems he was probing, and the fact that he only explored this particular mode once ensures that any answers he found remain unarticulated, and that any development he could make remains arrested . . . if indeed he found anything compelling to work on in these sessions.
At the end, I still find this album interesting, if not exactly essential listening. It definitely has its moments; perhaps these moments will continue to reveal themselves to me in the future.
Below is the album in its entirety, since it obviously is meant to function as one piece with five movements. If you feel the need to only sample part of this, listen to part four, which has an almost funky quality to it in places. Or, get all five parts rolling at once to get that much closer to Metal Machine Music . . . actually, yeah, that's the way to listen to this. Gets a lot more fun.
That's it for now. More solo guitar discs sometime in the future.
