UPCOMING EVENTS
July 3 Issue Project Room Brooklyn, NY -- with Alan Licht at 8 p.m.
Release & Performance Announcements
Guitarist Loren Connors was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1949. Best known as a composer and improviser, Connors has issued over 50 guitar records on his own imprints (Daggett, St. Joan, Black Label) since the late 1970s and over two dozen on other labels across the globe. He has recorded under the names Guitar Roberts, Loren Mattei, Loren MazzaCane Connors and other variations. Connors' singular adpation of the blues is a distinct personal vision combining the Delta bottleneck sound and the ancestral blues voice (appearing as distortion, baying hounds or multi-tracked guitar), with hauntingly unexpected sounds. Outside of Connors' three decades of solo work, he has collaborated with Suzanne Langille, Jim O'Rourke, Darin Gray, Alan Licht, Christina Carter, Keiji Haino, San Agustin, Jandek and many others, as well as leading the group Haunted House. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Two albums are out now, both dug from the archives: Two Nice Catholic Boys was recorded during the 1997 tour with Jim O'Rourke. Together, they unravel slow motion ghost blues across three extended pieces that evolve from Connors' martian style to the thundering, feedback splattered lead grooves of O'Rourke. The spontaneous melodies shift from devastating, country road intimacy to hypnotic overamped rock. The Curse of Midnight Mary is a 1981 acoustic blues recording that is the pinnacle of Connors' early acoustic improvised vision. Lost and forgotten, a cassette of this music -- made at Evergreen Cemetery -- was found by chance in 2008. Connors, singing in a trance like moan, reforms the Mississippi Delta blues on acoustic guitar with flashes of melodic hooks and a percussive guitar style that erupts into boogie-woogie riffs and other world spirituals.
