Narrative Guitar

live performance of Somnambulant Green, July 2021

In its most stripped back form, narrative guitar is just me and my guitar.  It is me working at the intersection of storytelling and music.  It combines text (sometimes from outside sources and sometimes my own) and guitar, sometimes together, sometimes in parallel, sometimes alternating, sometimes intersected by singing, humming or other vocal utterances.

The purpose of narrative guitar  is to explore the relationship between what might be the sophistication of classical guitar or the deeply personal nature of the songs of singer-songwriters or the communicative power of spoken word.  It is an evolving creative form I call narrative guitar, drawing on different influences for different projects, and as I work through material it will also combine other elements such as the incorporation of looped sound elements, or pre-composed interpolations or weave into the overall texture some found sounds as a kind of soundscape. 

Another iteration of narrative guitar that uses implicit narrative – using written words, images and found sound rather than spoken word – can be found in the seven movement work ‘Quarantine Station Variations’.  There is a narrative – it is a linear progression through time to explore the different uses of one area of land over a couple of hundred years – but the narrative is expressed in a different way. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp4PaqM45mo

More musings, experiments and stories to come…..