AXON PETAL RIOT

These tracks all dance across the terrain of a set of common themes, stretched out across a couple of years of erratic, spontaneous recording. They are extrapolations. It's possible that subconsciously these textures and ways of approaching the instrument were quasi-intentionally and strategically engaged, but it is also very possible that I simply had no idea what I was doing, that there's just a phase space of possible sounds that these hands make on that guitar, and every few weeks this constellation of gestures and sounds happened to happen. Like an asteroid cloud shepherded by a much larger gravitational force, the cloud adopts forms, geometries and patterns that it cannot itself perceive. Certainly with all of them, there was no rehearsal or preparation [...there is an exception. Apex Tonal Riot is an improvisation on a somewhat known tune I have played since the 1980s, but in the remix session it became unrecognizable, happily....] but there *was* a deliberate tactic of approach to the instrument qua guitar and specific techniques which I felt compelled to revisit.

And on the extrapolation side- there are also several opening harmonic moments- chords that again, the hands tend to grab- which echo other tracks on other albums. As Julio Cortazar has said: 'yes, but who will cure us of the dull fire, the colorless fire that at nightfall runs along the rue de la Huchette, emerging from the crumbling doorways... to burn like this without surcease, to bear the inner burning coming on like fruit’s quick ripening, to be the pulse of a bonfire in this thicket of endless stone, walking through the nights of our life, obedient as blood in its blind circuit... it would seem that a choice cannot be dialectical, that the fact of bringing it up impoverishes it... Why surrender to Great Habit? One can choose his ture, his invention...'

There are many monumental influences [from the world of guitar and beyond] catalyzing these sounds, which will go unlisted, but the clues might blush the surface in the hearing and the naming. I think I can hear them... I may have missed some... Quaerendo Invenietis!

The album cover art is a painting by Doug Diaz, dear friend and colleague for many years. In spring 2021 I reached out to explore whether soundscapes might be good provocations for his paintings, or vice-versa. Several of his paintings were then made under the influence of two of the tracks on this album, and this painting then resonated for me with the title, Axon Petal Riot, which is of course... a clue.

'We burn within our work, fabulous mortal honor, high challenge of the Phoenix. No one will cure us of the dull fire, the colorless fire that at nightfall runs along the Rue de la Huchette. Incurable, perfectly incurable...we invent our conflagration, we burn outwardly from within...' Hopscotch, Cortazar