Roger Miller is best known for being the guitarist in Mission of Burma, where he expanded the vocabulary of rock guitar playing by incorporating elements of free jazz and 20th Century classical music. His “Solo Electric Guitar Ensemble” expands the vocabulary in a new direction, with or without rock music. Miller’s involvement with loops began in 1979 when he asked Martin Swope to apply live multi-tracked tape looping to his Mission of Burma song “New Disco.” Time got bent inside-out, transformed. For several years after Mission Of Burma, he then worked with his ‘Maximum Electric Piano’ concept, incorporating live looping with guitar pedals connected to a piano. Looping is pivotal to this current record too.
Cuneiform Records is an independent record label releasing adventurous, boundary-bursting music by artists from around the world. Founded in 1984. Based in Washington D.C.
Eight Dream Interpretations For Solo Electric Guitar Ensemble by Roger C. Miller, 2022 on #neuguitars #blog #RogerMiller #CuneiformRecords
Roger C. Miller began conceptualizing his “Dream Interpretations for Solo Electric Guitar Ensemble” in 2018. He currently uses a regular electric guitar and three lap-steel guitars on stands, two of them loaded with alligator clips or bolts, the other to a post-Glenn Branca full unison E. Using bass and tenor guitar strings, this melted his previous prepared piano ideas into more portable guitars, resulting in percussive grooves, bass-lines, and similarities to the Chinese Ch’in. Combining looping technology with new guitar stomp-boxes, many in stereo, the sound palette is enveloping.
By tightly following and translating a specific dream into music, a new type of structure was available: organic and personal, yet universal. Realizing the essentially surrealistic/psychedelic nature of dreams, the type of guitar sounds he was interested in now had an appropriate context.
In performance, Miller sits in his cockpit, able to reach all four guitars and a plethora of pedals from one position. The music is highly organized while simultaneously often chaotic. There is improvisation as well as much reading of scores and a foot-dance on pedals It requires intense concentration to play these compositions, but they could not have occurred any other way.
credits
released August 26, 2022
All music performed by Roger C. Miller:
Custom Stratocaster 6-string;
three Rogue lap-steels (on legs), two prepared and one tuned unison E;
multiple foot pedals / sound-altering devices;
Boomerang III Looper
NeuGuitars 