>From: Greg.Mills(a)JWT.com
>
>The question I put to the collective genius of the assembly is this: What
>does Reichel's guitar work sound like?
Hans Reichel built his guitars (just as he built the daxophone). One of
the features of Reichel's guitars is that the strings extend beyond the
bridge, which allows for (i) secondary tones to be generated while playing
in the traditional manner and (ii) playing on the wrong side of the bridge.
This gives Reichel's guitar a unique and immediately recognizable sound.
(As recognizable as D. Bailey; the instant you hear it, you can say, "This
is Hans Reichel.") However relative to the bizarre sounds of his
daxophone, the sounds of his guitar work are not quite as alien to this
world.
The style of Hans Reichel's guitar playing is (as I am sure you can guess
from the fact that the bulk of his releases are on FMP) mostly
improvisational. But Reichel's songs are improvisations on a melody. His
songs are not harsh, not dissonant. On the contrary, they are some very
beautiful melodies that snake their way through the improvisations.
My recommendation for Reichel's guitar work is the split-cd "The Death of
the rare bird Ymir"/"Bonobo Beach" (FMP, CD 54 1993 (1979/81), cd). This
is two albums of his best playing on one cd. I have heard some people say
that "Bonobo" (a distinct album from "Bonobo Beach") which was never
reissued on cd, is his best album. Here I totally disagree. Surely
Reichel had some input into which of the lps in his FMP canon were selected
for rerelease on compact disc in the 1990's. He picked the best ones. It
is easy to hear that the idiosyncratic techniques of guitar playing that
appear on the earlier albums culminate in a mature and fully-developed
style on "The Death of the rare bird Ymir"/"Bonobo Beach".
My second recommendation (after this one) is the new daxophone cd on a|l|l,
an imprint of FMP, titled "Yuxo". It's very interesting to see hear how
Reichel's approach to the daxophone evolved in the intervening 10 years.
If there can be any criticism of "Yuxo", it is that the album is too
"studio slick", a claim which could never be made regarding his guitar
albums since they are all (at least all the FMP ones), "recorded as heard,
no overdubbing".
David K.
