Loud Noises in a Corner: Engagements on Urban Terrain John Bruce Wallace - solo guitar
The thing that strikes first about John Bruce Wallace’s solo improvised guitar style is the sizzling electric distortion pervading his tone. It's like the empty room filled with the electric guitar world of a man deeply abstract and introverted. It’s a personal world, one of thought and space, and gestures full of meaning. No trace of rock rhythmic structures, just rhythms growing out of and into feedback, twisting its way through questions answered by spaciousness or even silences. His thick and saturated tone captures a kind of steel industrial sound, gently relating to the development of the urban situation, and technological society on which he comments, and to the worldly issues faced by modern development. Wallace’s music comes out like a giant question with no apparent answer, just titles such as Afternoon, Early Evening, Evening, yielding the practice of meditation on guitar a way of tapping the human interior’s post pro-harmonic feedback. Notable too is the full-color reproduction of a painting of Wallace’s, depicting a man reaching and withdrawing simultaneously to what is revealed behind the curtain of the soul. Reflective. -LS
Jace W. Ball Creative Enterprises P.O. Box 66083, Washington, D.C.
138 the improvisor March, 96