Nick Didkovsky's "Profane Riddles"

Nick Didkovsky has the most varied skill set of any guitarist I know. His band Doctor Nerve combines heavy guitar with a blazing horn section in a zone somewhere between Frank Zappa and Rock In Opposition. Some of Nerve's material is generated with the aid of music composition software Didkovsky wrote. He was a member of the Fred Frith Guitar Quartet and plays black metal in Vomit Fist, with his son Leo on drums. He's crafted four albums exploring the extremities of distorted guitar sound in the duo CHORD with his friend Tom Marsan. More recently, he's investigated the possibilities of collaborative improvisation in duos with Frith Quartet bandmate Mark Howell (Screaming Into the Yawning Vacuum of Victory) and Sean Walsh (Guitar Duets: Five Demos, the full monte to be released later this year), and in a trio (Seagull Brain) with Howell and Chris Cochrane.

His new release, Profane Riddles, is the logical next step from those collabs: a collection of solo improvisations, each recorded in a single pass, with additional layers overdubbed in the same session. (Three of the tracks are "orphans" from previous sessions that Didkovsky reckoned would fit here. Guess which.) The project is dedicated to Nick's friend, the musician, programmer, and educator Larry Polansky, who passed shortly before its release. The album is intended to be listened to in a single sitting, and its 30-minute duration is conducive to such -- about the length of a meditation session, or what my old drummer said was the maximum for human attention before it starts to wander. 

Opener "Rebirth" sets the stage with rolling arpeggios that give way to a leisurely ascending scale. "Wherever I Am I Be," composed by Fluxus member Philip Corner, contrasts dark minor chords with chiming harmonics. The direct-to-board sound of a guitar with low-output pickups gives the music a distinctive character. The brief "Ascension" has a ringing, open sound, and a feel reflective of its title, while "This Sacred Purity, this Oppressive Paradise" shimmers with pellucid light. "My morning star and light-bearer" finds us back in CHORD territory, with aggressively strummed low chords and an overlay of harmonic feedback. The remaining tracks recombine these elements in different configurations, maintaining a consistency of mood. On "The hand, palm upward, fingers curled in ecstasy," the harmonics sometimes sound like tuned percussion, while on the closing "The morgue's final thoughts," reverberating harmonics resound like crashing waves. 

A transporting listen that has already triggered one vivid dream since I first heard it. As I type this, Didkovsky is working on a four-minute video, based on the mysterious Y.I.H.H.'s accompanying artwork, that nicely captures the music's spirit. Profane Riddles restores my belief in the communicative power of the electric guitar. Here's a Bandcamp link; if you order from Punos Music, all the bucks go directly to the artist. Do what you think is right.