Style
Tibbetts plays acoustic and electric guitar as well as exotic percussive instruments such as the kendang and kalimba. His musical compositions span several genres and styles including experimental, jazz, rock, ambient, and world music. He has self described his music as "post modern neo-primitivism". Often more than one genre or style is found in a single composition. A variety of techniques may be used with the guitar such as a string-bending technique sonically imitating a sarangi with a 12-string guitar while also alternating between ambient soundscape and Hendrix-like distorted and feedbacked leads with an electric guitar. He incorporates field-recordings such as the footsteps in the track "Running" from Safe Journey, or the chanting of Nepalese villagers from the last tracks of Big Map Idea. Tibbetts' recordings often include percussion by St Paul's Marc Anderson.
All Music states Tibbetts music is like "mosaics of world music doused in Tibbetts' particular brand of gasoline; not many explosions, but rather a steady wall of flame." The BBC noted Tibbetts' music as a "rich atmospheric brew" and "brilliant individual music making." Rolling Stone described the 1994 The Fall of Us All as "a trip of another, more explosive and enriching kind, a dynamic study of Eastern modality and universal spiritualism driven by rock & roll ambition." Stereophile promoted A Man About a Horse as "album of the month" January 2003.
Tibbetts also uses recording and editing as a creative process. The album A Man About a Horse features many tracks based on rhythms built from acoustic drumming recorded at various tape controlled pitches and speeds. These recordings were then sampled, sequenced and looped on synthesizers. He states, "I go back and forth between the sampler and tape machine so much--looping, cutting, offsetting, and layering--that eventually I don't know where the sounds come from." A collection of his loops and sound textures entitled Friendly Fire were released 2002 by Sonic Foundry for their Acid Loops series.
Read more about this topic: Steve Tibbetts
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“A church that can never have done with excommunicating Christ while it exists! Away with your broad and flat churches, and your narrow and tall churches! Take a step forward, and invent a new style of out-houses. Invent a salt that will save you, and defend our nostrils.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.”
—Ernest Hemingway (18991961)