RTP-area local music and culture

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---- Woody <deadceo AT gmail.com> wrote: 
> hey folks-
> 
> I'll be performing solo on my "electro-acoustic banjo" this Saturday
> at Nightlight with a bunch of bands (also in Asheville Thursday for
> other NC folks).  Info and a recent review from Chicago Reader
> below...
> 
> -Woody
> 
> 
> May 30, 10P @ Nightlight
> 405 1/2 W. Rosemary St., Chapel Hill, NC
> * Uncle Woody Sullender
> * w/ Actual Persons Living or Dead, Schooner, & Impossible Arms
> 
> 
> UNCLE WOODY SULLENDER
> http://deadceo.com/unclewoody
> Not too many musicians have redefined what the banjo is about the way
> Woody Sullender has. On his latest and best album, Live at Barkenhoff
> (K=FCnstlerh=E4user Worpswede/Dead CEO), the former Chicagoan evokes
> stringed instruments as disparate as John Fahey-style acoustic guitar
> and the Chinese lute called the pipa, all the while continuing to
> purge his playing of any traces of idiom=97a tough task, given that few
> sounds bring to mind a specific genre as inevitably as banjo evokes
> bluegrass. He subtly augments his rangy extended improvisations with
> computer noises=97usually either soothing drones or screechy violinlike
> sawing=97but the focus always stays on his playing.
> Here and there Sullender uses unusual techniques=97harmonics, string
> rubbing, percussive clattering=97but most of the time he sticks with
> conventional plucking. Though he retains the instrument=92s dry, brittle
> snap, he upends its familiar ambling flow, using tightly coiled, fast-
> flying tangles of notes and sprawling, meditative arpeggios. Some of
> the pieces use prewritten motifs and some are totally improvised, but
> each progresses with a clear logic, rising and falling, accelerating
> and decelerating, and thickening and dispersing as though telling a
> story.
>  =97Peter Margasak, Chicago Reader
> -- ch-scene: the list that mirrors alt.music.chapel-hill --
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/ch-scene