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:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“Everything ponderous, viscous, and solemnly clumsy, all long- winded and boring types of style are developed in profuse variety among Germans—forgive me the fact that even Goethe’s prose, in its mixture of stiffness and elegance, is no exception, being a reflection of the “good old time” to which it belongs, and a reflection of German taste at a time when there still was a “German taste”Ma rococo taste in moribus et artibus.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“On the first days, like a piece of music that one will later be mad about, but that one does not yet distinguish, that which I was to love so much in [Bergotte’s] style was not yet clear to me. I could not put down the novel that I was reading, but I thought that I was only interested in the subject, as in the first moments of love when one goes every day to see a woman at some gathering, or some pastime, by the amusements to which one believes to be attracted.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)