Called “Meend For Shaista”, it makes great play of the percussive possibilities afforded by Metzger’s augmentations, with an attack that keeps the sympathetics singing while alternating between an almost industrial strength flamenco technique that builds dizzying chordal drones from passages of klanging steel tones, and episodes of phantom multi-note glides.Meend is a term in Hindustani music that refers to a technique of gliding or sliding between several notes by the displacement of a single string. Karissa Chow . Really wicked combo.
It reverberates and bends notes in a way that has little to do with the flat, plainspoken tone of traditional banjo. They’re improvisers, they’re trying to expand the vocabulary, they’re doing the dangerous thing of group improv, and they’re really outstanding. You sit down and you listen to it and it’s for the people that are interested in doing that. Then I spend time with that version, see what happens and then maybe add some more. Metzger is well endowed with a powerful, personally honed technique, but The Uses Of Infinity is no onanistic exercise in virtuosity. “All Glass” lacks some of the jagged edges of “Canticle of Ignat,” but it’s certainly not monotonous in tone or style.It’s hard to argue with the banjo-centric concentration on Deliverance, but Metzger’s mix of instrumentation on this and other albums is a welcome one. I take the one that I’m less satisfied with and work on that, and then the other one becomes less satisfactory.” He’s set to record two guitar records in the months ahead, but 2007 was a banjo year that yielded two splendid new LPs. Both of these sets were remarkable for their uses of odd, hand-altered instruments, deep attention to patterned drones and an obvious mastery of technique. I adore plugging in the electric guitar with all that power. This further developed musical theme then is improvised further, chord-by-chord, where the instrument shows a beautiful warm resonance in the bass tones. His first mentor was Paul Webster, who taught him at Morley College (London), then privately, in the late 1990s.A recording of his early output for chamber ensemble and solo piano soon led to a string of collaborations with fringe theatre directors, short-film makers and popular music artists on both sides of the Channel – which notably saw a set of symphonic arrangements commissioned by singer-songwriter John Otway performed at the Royal Albert Hall.He embarked on a cycle of academic studies in 2005, first reading music under Joe Duddell at Exeter University, where he gained an MA in composition (in the course which he became composer-in-residence for the Exeter Children’s Orchestra) and, more recently, completing a PhD at Bristol University under the supervision of Geoff Poole and John Pickard (2014).Metzger’s compositional style is noted for its intense concentration and rarefied quality. When he does pick out single note melodies they’re fraught, emotionally high wire, with a keening, Hasidic cantorial quality more than a Northern Indian character.About halfway through there’s a striking passage where he repeatedly hits a single string to the point that it loses connection to the the way the piece has been unfolding. Amazing workmanship!! That isn’t to say there aren’t touches of the backwoods on Deliverance. It sounds like an invention that once were the different raga guitars created for Indian music, but then more close to a sarod in nature than a guitar. Going back through them, you’re struck, even as far back as those recorded in the 1980s with his group TVBC, by his unusual approach to technique and structuring.