Keenan Lawler

Keenan Lawler, born Glasgow, KY 1964, began his early musical life experimenting with flanging tapedecks and reverb tanks .In i981 he started an exploration of electric guitar and quickly established a distinct musicality and compositional sense. He began collaborating with a myriad of eclectic ensembles in the areas of Louisville & Lexington Kentucky playing everything from free improvisation to avant garde rock. A fascination with drone music of non western cultures brought him to Terry Riley and Tony Conrad, further solidifying the impression of sound & time .In 1990, he involved himself with composing and improvising music based on the technology of digital delay, looping and sampling. Around 1997, Lawler started to develop a vocabulary for the most unlikely of musical instruments, the resonator guitar. Drawn initially to the powerful depth and haunting ambience of the guitar while steadily incorporating sampling electronics & custom signal processors to create a unique voice. Once a quietly celebrated anomaly, Lawler has emerged as Kentucky's most prominent sound artist/experimental musician performing extensively and collaborating with such artists as Matmos, David First and Rhys Chatham. He has released his own work on the Konstant label.

A Suspension In Dreamtime (1998) is a composition concerned with transformative nature of sound. Non-electronic processes and techniques were employed to achieve a dense mass of overtones and metallic sustaining textures generated from an uneffected acoustic instrument. The four sections of this piece were created using only prepared and bowed metal bodied resonator guitar, microphones and piezo pickups recorded into a digital multi track recorder. Each track contained a specific isolated range of microtuned harmonics giving finer manipulation and control over the frequency spectra. These separate bands of sound were then combined into a cohesive sound picture with the cumulative effect of resonance creating a halo around the shifting polytonal center. This piece was inspired by an interest in minimalism, electronic trance music, electro-acoustic sound, audio entrainment and common often-chaotic cyclic events found in modern life.