Steve Tibbetts and Marc Anderson

ECM bio

Guitar Player interview

“All About Jazz” review

PlanetShifter:  ”Different” Questions

Eleventh House / Perfect Sound Forever:  interview & overview

“The Guardian” review

Downbeat review

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Chöying Drolma and
Steve Tibbetts

“ These two albums should be the standard by which all other East-West collaborations should be judged.” – All Music Guide referring to Selwa and it’s predecessor Chö

“…a heartbreakingly stunning record… If two worlds have ever met without cliché, Selwa is the language they will speak.” -EthnoTechno.com

“…one of 2004′s most gorgeous records. Tibbetts’ water-like serenity plays perfect partner to Drolma’s quiet fire. “ – Sing Out magazine

“Selwa is a beautifully performed, richly produced disc … In the lush, reverberating world the pair create, it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.” – The Far Eastern Audio Review

More Selwa Reviews

• Eternal Wisdom Review
• Mythical Vines Review
• Soothing Cavalcade Review
• Proposed Duo With Iggy Pop Review
• Various Amazon.com Reviews
• Crystalline Impressionism Review
• Misspelled Choying’s Name Review
• Uncommon Humility Review
• Tricycle Magazine Review
• Isthmus Review

Background on Vajrayana Buddhism

Steve Tibbetts

Steve Tibbetts’ guitar speaks in Eastern tongues: the acoustic liquid-raga curls of “Lupra”; the watery electric suggestion of Tibetan monks deep in murmured prayer in “Black Temple”; the icy distortion whipping through “Glass Everywhere.” A Minnesota instrumentalist whose pursuit of the transcendent in feedback and non-Western scales has taken him to Nepal and Indonesia and encompasses ten albums since 1977, Tibbetts also loves to rock: He recorded much of the searing guitar on “A Man About A Horse” in a single night, over frenetic Balinese drum samples colored and doubled by percussionists Marc Anderson and Marcus Wise. And Tibbetts’ white-hot screams and dives in “Chandoha” combine echoes of Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page, wailing as one in the snowy peaks of Kashmir. -Rolling Stone

ECM bio

Downbeat Review
Stereophile Review
San Francisco Bay Guardian Review
Dusted Review
Drug Review
Religious Review
Lukewarm Review
Should-be-more-famous Review
Reviewer on Mescaline? Datura?
Mix Magazine Review

Knut Hamre and Steve Tibbetts

…The process of crossing over, culturally, from West to East can be a journey fraught with peril, or at least questionable intent and results. But when it works, when musical ideas from disparate places find a common ground, the results can be truly ear-opening. Such successful mergers can exemplify the truism – verging on cliche – that music is the only genuine universal language.

That idea springs to mind while listening to the latest project from the category-defying, tone poet guitarist Steve Tibbetts, who has teamed up with Norwegian hardanger fiddler Knut Hamre for an intriguing and impressionistic set. The recording called Å is a lateral follow-up to Tibbetts’ cross-cultural rendezvous from 1996, on which the guitarist found paths of emotional resonance with Tibetan nun Chöying Drolma. The cultural turf is different here, of course, but the hardanger fiddle tradition – with the beguiling drone of its sympathetic strings beneath the melodic strings – shares with Tibetan chant a modal, meditative character that Tibbetts complements nicely.

No great change occurs to the signature approach heard on Tibbetts’ discography so far, with atmospheric-yet-engaging brushwork on electric and acoustic guitars. His is a paradoxical style: in Tibbetts’ soundscapes, nothing is sharp, but nothing vague. On the new recording, done in a suitably reverberant church in Norway, long-time percussionist-collaborator Marc Anderson and bassist Anthony Cox add to the mix, but the real point of focus is on Hamre’s haunting hardanger fiddling. The instrument’s unique sound, underscored by the droning timbral swirl of sympathetic strings, speaks in a dialect all its own. -Jazz Times

With the release of Ł, Madison-bred Steve Tibbetts reconfirms his special talent for merging traditional music with his own ambient approach to guitar. Here the traditional collaborator is Norwegian musician Knut Hamre, whose plaintive work on the hardingfele, a fiddle equipped with sympathetic drone strings, is both moving and mysterious.

As with Chö, Tibbetts’ deft collaboration with Buddhist nuns,  is less a world-music disc than an exploration of the musical interstices between disparate traditions. Instead of dominating the proceedings, Tibbetts’ guitar is generally employed as a gauzy foil for Hamre’s strange, cyclical fiddling. (Ethereal vocalist Turid Spildo also contributes hardingfele on several cuts.) Similarly, longtime Tibbetts percussionist Marc Anderson offers accents and and occasional elemental pulse instead of the lock-step dance beats normally associated with global hybrids. In other words, while this is still very much the guitarist’s disc, he gives his Scandinavian collaborator the task of developing the emotional core of each track. In some ways,  is really an extension of Northern Song, Tibbetts’ Norwegian-oriented debut for ECM; however, Hamre’s dissonant playing adds a kind of surreal dimension to the disc that really has more to do with the spiritual colors conjured by the utterly different Chö.

Once again, Tibbetts has shown that the exposure of geographically isolated traditions doesn’t have to be exploitative or blandly commercial. Given the chance to hear it, a broad swath of the “alternative” audience would surely be mesmerized by his shamanistic magic. -Isthmus

Ryko/Hannibal Bio
Billboard Review

Chöying Drolma and Steve Tibbetts

“Over the past few years, the music of Tibetan monks has gained a massive audience, with Western listeners finding refuge from the rat race in the chants and songs of the East. Those same medicinal properties are at the core of this breathtaking collaboration between veteran Minneapolis guitar wizard Steve Tibbetts and Chöying Drolma, a Buddhist nun whom Tibbetts met and recorded at a small monastery in Nepal. When Tibbetts returned home with the tape of Drolma’s supernatural vocals he added some instruments to the songs and sent the tape back to the nunnery as a gift, and to Rykodisc and Hannibal Records, who decided to release it. The result is “Chö” (English translation: “cutting”), a beautiful pastiche of celestial songs that evokes a tenderness, optimism and appetite for life that cuts through in any language. Tibbetts’ understated instrumentation nicely complement the nuns’ disciplined chants, to the point where it sounds as if they’ve been collaborating forever.” -St. Paul Pioneer Press

Isthmus Review
Philadelphia Inquirer Review
Star-Tribune Article

Steve Tibbetts

This is guitar music rich with pictures, elegantly morphing images that seem to float over and through one another in liquid collision like an old Fillmore light show: Jimi Hendrix in a weather-beaten bark canoe, paddling upriver through a light curtain of rain in an Asian jungle; Bo Diddley as a Buddhist monk robed in saffron, shuffling off to his dawn prayers in time to his trademark shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits beat; Carlos Santana struck dumb in the Sahara in front of a tremulous desert mirage; Robert Fripp in the court not of the Crimson King, but of the Dalai Lama.

As a guitarist, Steve Tibbetts definitely makes great mind movies. But The Fall of Us All, Tibbetts’ sixth album for ECM, is also a trip of another, more explosive and enriching kind, a dynamic study of Eastern modality and universal spiritualism driven by rock & roll ambition. Immediate touchstones are the Zenlike art pop of Brian Eno’s Another Green World, Santana’s classic 1972 album of Coltrane-ish Arabian mysticism, Caravanserai, and the Butterfield Blues Band’s prescient 1966 blues-raga East West. But Tibbetts is very much his own man as both a composer and an improviser.

You can hear it, indeed feel it, in the breathtaking guitar and percussion ballet Dzogchen Punks. A typhoon whirl of Tibbetts’ manic Indo guitar and the startling gunfire percussion of his long-time collaborator, Marc Anderson, suddenly brakes into a dark, free-fall expanse of water-music riffing and finger-tap drumming, like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness meets the third side of Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland. In Full Moon Dogs, Tibbetts opens with that scuffling Bo-cum-Buddha beat against the dulcimer-like chime of his own acoustic guitar and floating, wordless female vocals before ripping into a heated guitar and percussion argument, complete with high-speed congas and clanging prayer cymbals.

If nothing else, The Fall of Us All is a great showcase for Tibbetts’ ways with guitar feedback. In Roam and Spy, he shifts with graceful elasticity from revving-motorcycle growls to pithy dot-dash transmissions and laserlike beams of scream. But context, not chops, is everything on this album, whether it’s the light brush-stroke harmonics of Tibbetts’ guitar in Drinking Lesson or the way his acoustic mourning becomes electric halfway through Hellbound Train with a cat’s cradle of acid-blues guitar tangle, voodoo percussion, and apoplectic drumbeats.

Tibbetts has spent the better part of two decades and eight albums – including two now rare, independent late-70s releases–in search of the Lost Chord. With The Fall of Us All, he has found something very close to it. -Rolling Stone

…a gripping soundscape that fluctuates from primal rage and caustic guitars on the industrial sizzlers to ambient ear massages on acoustic interludes. The Fall never falls short of exhilarating. -USA Today

It’s when Tibbetts plugs his guitar in that his music really escapes the pull of this earth and begins to chart the nether regions of the cosmos. On most of the electric cuts, Tibbetts erupts in his trademark style, which sounds somewhere between Carlos Santana on some fierce brown acid and Ghidrah the Three-Headed Monster thrashing against high-voltage power cables in the night sky above Tokyo. -City Pages

ECM Bio

Atlantic Monthly Review (and original)

Steve Tibbetts, Marc Anderson

Experimental guitar collides with tabla, kalimba, pianolin, cello, steel drum and other percussion instruments, and tapes of “found sounds.” The CD opens with a lush cover of Jimmy Page’s Black Mountain Side, and ever afterwards devotes itself to the vast, mysterious explorations of Tibbetts and percussionist Marc Anderson. The music’s brooding and orchestral, with moments of Eastern intrigue giving way to sudden crescendos, children’s voices, and industrial grunge. Tibbetts’ bold single-string passages pilot twists and turns above slapped and strummed acoustic rhythms, and his quirky detunings and oddball figures provide a cinematic, edge-of-the-seat experience. No timidity or lack of ideas lurking here. -Guitar Player

Downbeat review

Steve Tibbetts, Marc Anderson, Marcus Wise, Bob Hughes, Claudia Schmidt

(Performance: A+) Exploded View – a perfect name for a recording that detonates like a fission bomb and rebuilds the world in a new form. On this roaring maelstrom of an album, Tibetan monks moan through subharmonic feedback drones. The dervish percussion is like a global drum choir, as Marc Anderson and Marcus Wise play the rhythms of India, Africa, and Morocco with one mind. And through it all is the sound of Steve Tibbetts’ guitar, a cathartic wail of siren choirs and scorching melodies.

Tibbetts belongs to a lost generation of musicians, the ones who grew up listening to the progressive and underground sounds of the ’60s and early ’70s and were left in the cold when the music went corporate. On Exploded View the guitarist continues to compose a personalized music filtered through his emotions, his guitar pyrotechnics, and his studio experimentation. Playing with the same musicians he’s worked with since his first self-produced recording in 1977, he leaves nothing out, and yet it all works.

Unlike the more contemplative meditations of his first two ECM recordings (Northern Song and Safe Journey), Exploded View most recalls Yr, Tibbetts’ ground-breaking 1979 recording. Like Yr, Exploded View journeys through carefully wrought landscapes, with urgent acoustic guitars giving way to screaming feedback, the steady gurgle and throb of percussion, and the plaintive cry of Claudia Schmidt.

Recording in his home studio, Tibbetts gets an astounding clarity of sound that is well served by this CD. Tablas and congas have never had a more visceral punch, their sharpness defining and punctuating Tibbetts’ sustained electric lines and the resonance of his acoustic guitar. The only way to listen to this record is loud. -Audio

If primitive man had invented the electric guitar and multi-track recording before the wheel, he might have made an album much like this one. Exploded View – the third ECM release by this extraordinary Minnesota guitarist and tape manipulator – is tribal music with a fascinating futurist spin. The album is vividly articulate in its evocation of natural phenomena and spiritual aura (the bull elephant roar of Tibbetts’ screaming fuzz guitar; the eerie mix of gentle acoustic plucking, a galloping tabla drum and a strangely treated tape of Nepalese monks chanting in the distance on Another Year). Marc Anderson’s forceful percussion has an animated, almost conversational quality, and Tibbetts’ striking fret work runs the gamut from meditative solo passages to heartstopping blasts of rainbow feedback. Don’t be fooled by the ECM label here; Exploded View is neither chamber jazz nor New Age mood music. Indeed, Tibbetts’ exotic soundscape is more like prehistory made new – Margaret Mead-meets-Electric Ladyland. -Rolling Stone

Steve Tibbetts

(Four and 1/2 stars) If the concept of “world music” has established itself in recent years, then Steve Tibbetts must be included in the list of pioneers. This is his fourth album, and it would be hard to imagine a more adventurously eclectic record.

The elements of Tibbetts’ music are truly pan-global. Consider the instruments: the acoustic guitar is of Spanish origin; the electric guitar and electric bass are recent American inventions; the kalimba is African; the tabla Indian; the steel drum and the various percussion instruments are from Latin America. Some of these instruments are very old while others are virtually brand new. And Tibbetts’ techniques – especially his use of tape manipulation and multi-track recording – are based on very recent technology.

Tibbetts’ music, like the instruments he uses, is culturally diverse. Like Kip Hanrahan, he is a composer / conceptualizer whose ideas are not contained within conventional musical boundaries. Unlike Hanrahan, Tibbetts is the chief instrumentalist in his work, and his compositions are based on the multi-tracking of his guitar and kalimba parts.

Each piece on Safe Journey is a textural construction, a layering of sounds, rhythms, and ideas. The fundamental concepts are primarily Western – bits of folk music, rock, jazz, and modern classical – but Tibbetts’ use of repeating figures and cyclic structures brings to mind the Indonesian gamelan music that influenced Steve Reich. Tibbetts’ guitar playing is rooted in familiar folk and rock techniques. When he chooses to overlay distorted power chords with screaming single-note lines, it is easy to hear the legacy of Jimi Hendrix. His use of space and long sustaining passages, though, suggests early Pink Floyd and Soft Machine, and some of his layering and tape manipulation recalls the experiments of the Beatles (think of Strawberry Fields).

If the album has a flaw, it is that some of the pieces are too brief – they end just as you are being drawn into them. But, overall, Tibbetts’ music has a persuasive charm that grows on one with repeated listenings. It encourages you to listen and hear in new ways, and that is one of the best things any music can do. -Downbeat

Steve Tibbetts, Marc Anderson

I don’t think I’ve ever heard an album so given over to silence. In a sense, this album is an acknowledgment of the ultimate power of silence over music. Listeners wedded to form and structure and momentum will probably find “Northern Song” unsettling, even exasperating. Those who can allow themselves to be transported in the few moments a struck chord endures against the power of silence should find it captivating. -Stereo Review

Oakland Tribune review