Wednesday 4 September 2024, 7.30pm
Bill MacKay is a guitarist, composer, and improviser based in Chicago.
A renowned solo artist and accomplished collaborator with projects that include solo albums Esker (2017), Fountain Fire (2019) and Locust Land (2024), and recordings with cellist Katinka Kleijn (Stir, 2019), Nathan Bowles (Keys, 2021), and Ryley Walker (SpiderBeetleBee, 2019), all released on Drag City Records, MacKay has pursued his musical investigations with obsessive rigor.
A deep radiance envelopes even MacKay's most dissonant explorations, and his trajectory travels seamlessly from the avant-garde to folk modes and further. In his music, tradition is invited to be reinvented.
MacKay is also a poet, visual artist and polyglot, and is a member of both the avant-garde rock outfit Black Duck (with Douglas McCombs) and the experimental groove-drone project BCMC (with Cooper Crain).
Over the last decade, C Joynes has ploughed a singular furrow through solo guitar, with a body of work incorporating English folk-tunes alongside North & West African music, and lifting proto-minimalist and improvised techniques from the European classical and avant-garde traditions.
Joynes has released 10 albums to date, including ‘Poor Boy On The Wire’ (2021), his first solo album dedicated wholly to the electric guitar; ‘The Borametz Tree’ (2019), recorded with long-term fellow travellers Dead Rat Orchestra; and ‘The Wild Wild Berry’, a collaboration with singer Stephanie Hladowski (fROOTS Editors Choice Album Of The Year 2012, MOJO Top 5 Folk Albums 2012). He has recorded a number of sessions for BBC Radio 3. He has also played extensively across the UK, Europe and the USA, sharing bills with a broad range of performers including Shirley Collins, Martin Carthy, Marc Ribot, Richard Dawson, Alasdair Roberts, Jack Rose, Josephine Foster, Sir Richard Bishop, Six Organs Of Admittance and 75 Dollar Bill.
Shifting away from the electric guitar of his most recent solo activities, he’s currently exploring the uses of an amplified archtop guitar, exploiting the instrument’s potential for placing intricate parlour music alongside overdriven garage blues throw-downs and the brittle ringing tones of free improvisation.
“As much Conlon Nancarrow and Ali Farka Toure as Blind Lemon Jefferson, the compositional mind at work here can take apparently disparate threads of modernism and ethnic tradition and treat them as though they were all archaic blues styles learnt from dusty 78s.” – BRUCE RUSSELL, THE WIRE
“An inheritor to Davy Graham; a lone operator prone to unexpected collaborations, with a repertoire that crosses continents and timezones with consummate ease, and dashed off with a phenomenal, yet lightly applied technique.” ROB YOUNG, THE WIRE
