Glen Weyant-Transmissions: New Work For Electric Guitar, Amplifier and Effects; Sonicanta Records, 2024

 

Preceded by a kind of preamble in the form of an email, Glen Weyant's most recent release is Transmissions: New Work For Electric Guitar, Amplifier and Effects. The listener is presented with just under an hour's duration of solo electric guitar explorations. These are not shred guitar sounds that Weyant pulls for the guitar/amp/effects combination. Nor are they simply textures, an accomplishment of the raw field recording technique that Weyant used for their capture. Ambient sounds such as a foot engaging a foot pedal are present. Also present are Glen's melodic ideas, his layering ideas, his shards of sound ideas, his controlled feedback ideas (is that a Fender Twin you're using dude?), his ideas of space versus density in the sound field, and so much more. Recordings such as Transmissions are generally excellent windows into the creative approaches of their makers, and it is no exception. Disaster Amnesiac would like to recommend that one start out with Transmissions Pt. 2, for Weyant pulls out sounds that are a touch more approachable within the standards of "normal music" (not that I can really clarify what that is or is not), but I feel that to be the case. Transmissions Pt. 1 is a bit more initially stunning for its pretty much immediate jump into the abstracted bliss zone that is so coveted by weirdos like me and probably thousands of others (in some ways a secret society with Grouch Marx tendencies). Dig in and drop out, your tax dollars are being wasted on bullshit anyway.