Strange strings from home and abroad invade the Red Room!

Doors at 8:30, music at 9

A virtuoso on a 23-string banjo he built himself, Paul Metzger’s idiosyncratic & deeply original long form improvisations at times bring to mind American primitive guitar, the sarod of Hindustani music, or the Chinese Erhu. Though refracted through his singular musical mind he creates a sonic universe all his own. Metzger’s “home made” aesthetic puts him alongside DIY mavericks like Eugene Chadbourne and his electric rake, and Charlie Nothing and his dingulators, but Metzger also posses a penchant to extract every possible sound out of an instrument that is reminiscent of the exhaustive instrumental explorations of Derek Baily. His many releases over the years have garnered high praise and helped establish him as a central voice in the world of Avant Garde & Experimental Folk. Metzger creates a unique music evocative of some magical forgotten age, but simultaneously one deeply rooted in the eternal present when fingers touch strings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQAPrbDY0qs
https://paulmetzger.net/

Guitarist, thereminist, singer, and player of some species of dismantled electrified folk, John Saint Pelvyn is a musical enigma of the best kind. At the root of his playing is something akin to traditional stride, but rich with quivering whammy bar wobble and shimmering feedback. He often plays the tailfin strings of his archtop like one would play harmonics, or retunes seamlessly mid-stream to create a shifting temperament across the length of a piece. An affinity for the likes of John Fahey or Loren Mazzacane-Connors can be heard here, but the comparisons quickly fall away as one takes in this ambidextrous musical sensibility. He will sing otherworldly vocal duets with his theremin while simultaneously accompanying himself fingerpicking, or will throw modulated feedback tones across otherwise inviting harmonic landscapes based on blues & folk motifs, overshadowing them with clouds of squelch that loom like an approaching post-noise squall, but that ultimately swell and punctuate more like the tone clusters of Henry Cowell or the lyrical saxophone of Frank Lowe.
https://midheaven.com/item/a-clerical-error-in-shasta-county-shouldnt-have-to-ruin-a-saturday-night-by-saintpelvyn-john
https://kabairdjohnsaint-pelvyn.bandcamp.com/releases

As a guitarist, Nicola Hein is mainly concerned about the search for new sounds on his instrument. He plays electric and acoustic guitar with or without preperations and tries to find new ways of playing the guitar within the context of Free Improvised Music and Jazz. He plays the guitar with his hands and plectrum but also with a lot of different objects: screws, rulers, iron wool, violin bow, abrasive paper, magnets and many other objects which are part of his musical vocabulary. The result is his very own world of sounds, which is using the rich potential of the guitar as a creator of sounds. The manual creation is a very important character of this sound world, which never gets distorted by the use of electronic effects.
As a composer he finds different ways of integrating philosophical ideas into music and to play music as a form of philosophy. In order to actualize itself the compositional work is always aimed at the improvising musician as a dialectic partner of the composition. From the interplay of these partners an ästhetic emerges that is based on the spontanity of the performance and the setting of aesthetic action spaces alike.