Fire Music by N O Moore

N O Moore electric guitar


GUITARISM

I think I first attended Eddie Prévost’s Improvisation Workshop in 2016 or so. This was the first time I had been in a situation of playing with other people for a number of years. In fact, my only real experience of playing with others, in a sustained way, was with some close school friends in my teenage years. I was involved, briefly, with electronic music in the interim but, for about 20 years or so, music was, for me, a solitary and private activity.
So, the workshop was a bit of a blast. I was uncertain of what I could do – in life, that uncertainty has been a bit of a burden. Probably a resultant combination of class-based imposter syndrome and more recently diagnosed autism. Whatever, the workshop was a step into the world. I remember feeling very happy when, on my fourth or fifth visit, Eddie said to me privately, ‘what you are doing is very interesting’.
For the next few years, the workshop and Eddie’s approach to music, were paramount for me. These recordings, made at home, date from that period. They are experiments but, nevertheless, complete unto themselves. A quest to test the materials (electric guitar and effects) at hand.
Another workshop attendee, Daniel Kordik, became a friend and influence. Daniel used (then) analogue synths. From this, I came to view the guitar as analogous to the function of an oscillator in a synth. This approach became, in my mind, ‘guitarism’. Soon after, this word expanded to denote an attempt to combine some of the techniques of Derek Bailey and Keith Rowe; that is, approaching the guitar both as an instrument with an attendant history and, related to that history, potentials to explore (Bailey); whilst, at the same time, treating it as a (found) object, suggesting on each occasion of contact that we don’t yet know what a guitar can do (Rowe). Guitarism is an attempt to tap into what the guitar has not done, involving a paradoxical need to recognize what it has been, what it cannot fail to be, what it has not been and, perhaps, cannot be.
That sounds too abstract. What I am trying to say is that, as a daydream, I like to imagine a history that would recount everything that didn’t happen. Applying that daydream to electric guitar is what I mean by guitarism.
N O Moore April 2025

since 1994

pay what you can afford

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