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
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