Mick Barr - hmmm...

[robinbowes]

Stumbled across Mick Barr vids again this evening:



Whadda think?

Total genius or total shite?

R.

[Bellycaster]

Stumbled across Mick Barr vids again this evening:



Whadda think?

Total genius or total shite?

R.

I'd never heard of him before tonight and have never heard of his bands. He's definitely not Shite. He certainly has a penchant for dissonance and morbidity. You can tell from the quicker passages he is playing he is hitting the notes he intends to hit, so his dexterity is not random.....ie.... he is not just hitting any old note and hoping for the best.

Whether or not someone finds it pleasing to their ears is subjective, he definitely knows what he is doing and I think he has probably worked to be exactly the opposite of "melody". It's strange but it's his, so I guess he is an absolutely ODD genius.

It's good to have someone completely off the charts like this IMO.

The acid test is to see if you can transcribe it and play it. I bet he could play the same or very nearly the same thing to you again.

He should try to do some scores for Horror films, it would fit perfectly.

[erictheweary]

Never heard of him. It's fine but I hear bits of early Sabbath, bits of spaghetti westerns, bits of the Stooges and it goes on a long time and I want to hear what he is doing in a more structured way - which I'm sure is defeating the object of what he is doing.

I used to listen to some No Wave stuff and this would have fit well in there but much of that was group improvisation and without more musicians or a more obvious musical structure it is, at the end of the day, somebody wanking around on a guitar. I have a clip on a dvd somewhere of John McLaughlin doing an improvisation accompanied only by percussion and I know he is a skilled player but it still sounds like somebody wanking around on a guitar rather than a cohesive piece of music.

FWIW somebody posted a ten minute Van Halen solo on here the other week and I liked this a lot more than that.

Here is one of my musical heroes doing five minutes of unaccompanied free jazz improvisation*. When I was a student I used to like to play this stuff as loud as possible to express my alienation ( which everyone else was doing by listening to The Smiths).





* which is almost Kylie Minogue compared to the group stuff in the second half of the clip.