ALBUM REVIEW: Amplified Guitar – Mat Ball

You know MAT BALL as one-third of Montreal’s experimental bludgeoners BIG | BRAVE. His guitar work underpins those tidal washes of sound we’ve been enjoying since their breakthrough on Au De La, and following the success of 2021’s Vital (as well as their comprehensive 43-date European tour), the guitarist now ventures from beneath BIG | BRAVE’s big name to release his solo debut, simply titled Amplified Guitar.

Cards on the table. This is a 40-minute collection of semi-improvised solo guitar music. We’d forgive you for stopping reading there, but don’t. There’s plenty going on here to make this interesting. For a start, it was recorded by Efrim Manuck of GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR fame. Cult-figure seals of approval get no higher in Quebec. Moreover, the guitar which is being amplified was carefully constructed by Ball himself (in conjunction with Obscura MFG), with the guitarist relying on his side-hustle as a woodworker to help him select the wood which makes up the body of the instrument. Still here? Excellent.

Amplified Guitar couldn’t be a more apposite name for this album. This is a study in the interaction between instrument and amplifier, and amplifier and instrument. Feedback, that shrill but oh-so-sweet sound, comprises a great deal of the sonic palette from which Ball is painting here. In skilled hands, it’s not the unwanted afterbirth of a note played too loudly but an acoustic phenomenon that can become something musical in its own right. Guitar savants have been exploiting it from the day a guitar was first plugged into a crackling valve amplifier, and many who stand in Ball’s lineage (including Dylan Carlson of EARTH) have deployed it extensively to create their own singular semi-musical visions.

Ball is not proceeding from a rock sensibility with Amplified Guitar. There are no hooks to hang your hat on here, and barely even the ground beneath you to drop it on. This is written and performed from the improv-jazz textbook, no doubt. It’s a swirling, ethereal, train-of-consciousness sort of affair, which gives rise to transient moments of slightly uncomfortable beauty, all the more precious for their fleeting presence. It’s a textural sort of pleasure, rather than musical per se. Many of these subtle complexities in tone are (of course) in play with BIG | BRAVE, but they tend to get buried beneath the seismic onslaught.

Here the listener is invited to enjoy those subtle complexities boldly unadorned. The risk with a project like this is that it’s going to feel more like a technical demonstration of the musician’s ability, rather than something thought-through and heart-felt, and Ball has done well to avoid sounding like the guy in a guitar shop noodling around the fretboard for an hour. Actually, he’s far surpassed that. It’s his artistic restraint and the thorough, hard-won knowledge of his instrument and stack that separates this from showy solo schlock.

Appraising something so blissfully bare and purely personal seems like unjust violence. We were compelled to allow Mat to carry us away for the length of the record on the sheer potency of the sound alone, as he led us into moments of uncomfortable beauty and surreal internal landscapes. At its core this is an album all about resonance, and anyone half-interested in guitars, amplifiers (or both) will have it resonate with them too. 

Rating: 8/10

Amplified Guitar is out now via The Garotte.

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