Calendar of Events

Boston Center for the Arts  and Nonevent present overheard/underground

March 14th | 8-10pm | $10
Lescalleet &
Keith Rowe

Keith Rowe began his career playing jazz in the early 1960's with early influences of Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian and Barney Kessel. Eventually growing tired of what he considered the form's limitations and began experimenting. Soon after a New Year's resolution to stop tuning his guitar Rowe gradually expanded into free jazz and free improvisation, eventually abandoning conventional guitar technique altogether.

Rowe reports he was partly inspired by a teacher in one of his painting courses who told him, "Rowe, you cannot paint a Caravaggio. Only Caravaggio can paint Caravaggio." After considering this idea from a musical perspective, "trying to play guitar like Jim Hall seemed quite wrong." For several years Rowe contemplated how to reinvent his approach to the guitar, again finding inspiration in visual art, namely, American painter Jackson Pollock, who abandoned traditional painting methods to forge his own style. "How could I abandon the technique? Lay the guitar flat!"

Some accounts report that Rowe's guitar technique was an influence on Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett: "Taking his cues from experimental guitarist Keith Rowe of AMM, Barrett strived to push his music farther and farther out into the zone of complete abstraction."

Rowe developed various prepared guitar techniques: placing the guitar flat on a table and manipulating the strings, body and pickups in unorthodox ways to produce sounds described as dark, brooding, compelling, expansive and alien. He has been known to employ objects such as a library card, rubber eraser, springs, hand-held electric fans, alligator clips, and common office supplies in playing the guitar. A January, 1997 feature in Guitar Player magazine described a Rowe performance as "resemble a surgeon operating on a patient." Rowe sometimes incorporates live radio broadcasts into his performances, including shortwave radio and number stations. Rowe utilizes this technique masterfully, mixing in random operatic and chance encounters with talkshow hosts, which serves to anchor the sound in humanity, amidst the vast abstraction.


Jason Lescalleet uses reel-to-reel tape decks to explore the textures of low fidelity analog sounds and the natural phenomena of old tape and obsolete technology. He is one of a growing list of master producer/musicians, whose skill lies as much in reworking, assembling and mastering the material available as in creating it. He has worked with a wide variety of artists including Ron Lessard, Joe Colley and Phill Niblock, and has released a string of solo discs such as Mattresslessness, Electronic Music and The Pilgrim. This is his second release for Erstwhile, after 2001's Forlorn Green (w/ Greg Kelley), and his third has just been released, a duo with Bhob Rainey.