Ideas generate electric guitar technique-- novel finger picking, manual LFO-- from which emerge Songs as technique recedes into the background. Listen to imagine adding your sound. In the moment, it happens: music made together. I am one person, ready. These songs are searching for people, for meaning. In one, I find it.
The electric guitar as a folk instrument unfinished in its evolution, invites engagement in its becoming. I have chosen to add and also subtract strings, to play with my fingernails, and to shred not by rapidly picking the string, but by rapidly interrupting the signal of the electric guitar itself. I have built an amplifier that allows me to more directly commune with the electricity the electric guitar channels.
The instrument is important to me because it allows me to enter a world of ideas where all sounds are possible and no sound can be completely blocked out by any other. Really, any instrument can offer the same. Learning to enter into and exist within such a world has made me a better person in this one. This is the reason why to listen to this, or any music. It is an encouragement to dream and to learn to embody those dreams in reality.
About the songs:
1. Message of Universal Solidarity is a programmatic work. I begin by experimenting with ideas that eventually coalesce at 4:47 into a call to connect with others at that radiates outward. The call is answered by Will Hicks. The high A tone emerges at the end of the piece to signify that when people come together, the sum of their work is greater than its parts.
2. Steve Seymour. Absence has its own impact. Moving a piece of steel over the pickup interrupts the electric guitar’s signal. Moving it fast enough creates its own tone. I miss my friend.
3. Still Here, Still Ripping. Now 8 years past my own near-death, this is the reminder to be in the moment, stay engaged, and get cosmic.
4. Adomono Tone Control is a meditation on the early history of the electric guitar. I just know there is more to it than what is written. There are many players barely mentioned, unheard, or forgotten because they were operating at the margins. But that’s where things get interesting, so I continue to seek…
CYRUS PIREH was born in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, usa on March 22, 1981. As a composer, Cyrus' works involve sign manipulation with the purpose of keeping the interpretive field open. As a guitarist, Cyrus seeks the limits of the body and the self as a pathway to transcendence. As an anarchist, Cyrus actively works to dismantle hierarchy and to heal the damages done by industry's division of people into performers and audience; producers and consumers. In music, it is not possible to obstruct one sound with another. All sounds combine to create one harmony. Humans in harmony liberate each other.
Cyrus Pireh complete bio:
4gre.org/C/bio.html