R. Keenan Lawler

2006 release ** Keenan Lawler has spent the last 25 years developing his own personal sound world, constantly pushing himself in new directions and developing new techniques, while remaining completely focused on his vision. His experiments on 1930 national resonator guitar are the stuff of legend you sometimes hear from town to town by someone who may have had the good fortune to witness one of his performances. Words such as cosmic, monolithic and deeply american have been used to describe the experience of his music. he has worked with other like-minded musicians such as Matmos, Pelt, Rhys Chatham, John Butcher, Charalambides, Ignaz Schick, Philip Samartzis, My Morning Jacket, David Watson and Lukas Ligeti. In 1999 he self released ghost of a plane of air, it quickly went out of print and has since been heralded by many as a minimalist masterpiece. It is now available for a larger audience. Lawler here pushes the bounds and very definition of the resonator guitar: bowing, picking, scraping, knocking and combining it with electro-acoustic manipulations and on site recordings. The sound that pours from the speakers is dense, affecting, cavernous and like no other, often delving from delicate picking into a flurry of notes and ecstatic drones. Ghost of a plane of air is the sound of a man looking deep into his soul and coming out the other side changed, scarred and poetic. this reissue has been remastered, and includes a previously unreleased song recorded during the same time period.