Search - Rod Poole :: Death Adder

Rod Poole has elegantly bypassed any desire to utilize advances in guitar technology, choosing instead to reinvent the sound of the guitar by twisting his tuning pegs. In Death Adder, an almost 50-minute-long guitar improvisation, Poole starts out with harmonics and a lot of background noise--as though he is adjusting his position in his seat. He then moves on to double harmonics, and one can hear a light airy sound of cars passing by in the background. Diving into the piece, plucking his way in, Poole's music relies heavily upon the dissonance created between two notes that are very close in pitch; he straddles the harmonics and the dissonant notes. The unprocessed guitar sounds incredibly flat, as though he is trying to mimic the synthetic feel of sequenced music. But when he ventures into polyphony, the music rings and sings with a great deal of energy. --Ryan Kuykendall