Richard Carrick: Stone Guitars
New Focus Recordings - Released July 2014
Available on iTunes, Amazon, New Focus Recordings

1. Dawn
2. Babylon
3. Intimate Spaces
4. Stone Guitars
5. One
6. Astral Projections
7. Winter Guitars
8. Molten
9. Sinking
10. Granite
11. Undersea

Program Note:

Stone Guitars recording has been used for Dance performances by Catherine Tharin and her Dancers in NYC and Joy Davies and Boston Conservatory Dancers.

Stone Guitars is both the title of Richard’s CD released on New Focus Recordings (FCR149, July 2014) as well as a composition for electric guitar and CD playback.

Stone Guitars can be performed live as a 55 min. set of 11 pieces, or any subset.  The pieces span from fully notated works, to improvised works and works with CD playback.  They can be performed with solo electric guitar and playback, or by four performers. 

Stone Guitars CD review

"Carrick is certainly inventive in his use of electric guitars. I’ve always though the possibilities of expression were vastly underused by most electric players. You have to conceive of it as a totally different instrument from the classical guitar, capable of things impossible on the classical instrument—sustained sounds, even a single note crescendo by the use of amplification. Carrick creates a sound world in these mostly brief pieces. He performs in a mixture of composition and improvisation—I’d be interested to see the scores, if there are scores. There are 11 pieces, with titles like ‘Intimate Spaces’, ‘Molten’, and ‘Undersea’.

There is a minimalist influence, certainly, and a resemblance to ambient music—but it’s more interesting than ambient sounds, stuff I’ve always dismissed as music not to be listened to. This rises above that, though each piece is in stasis, each with a different set of sounds, gradually shifting almost imperceptibly. There is no rock or pop influence here, and it may change your perception of electric guitar.”

© 2014 American Record Guide

About the CD

Richard played guitar as a teenager, and picked up a classical guitar a few years ago to perform Helmut Lachenmann's Salut für Caudwell.  This seminal experience sparked an interest in returning, with compositional ears, to the de-tunable, effects-heavy electric guitar to create these new works.

The title Stone Guitars symbolizes the indestructible texture of the electric guitars while referencing the title track’s premiere at John Zorn's venue The Stone. The music is nostalgic, raw, direct, meditative, bold, evocative, distorted, and micro-tonally dense.

Although Carrick typically collaborates with other musicians on performances of his music, this project was created in isolation and recorded during many late nights. Composition, performance, and improvisation were completely intertwined with the recording and editing possibilities in a unique and singular way. 

Each guitar layer was recorded sequentially without monitoring the previous layers.  Using memory, visual cues (visual click track, tracking graphics of the previous recordings), and compositional structures, each line spontaneously evolved with an independent flow. A similar process was used for the solo piano CD Containment (self released) and adapted to notated music in The Veins of Marble for chamber orchestra, Dark Flow - Double Quartet for two independently performing quartets, and Prisoner’s Cinema for chamber orchestra with video projection.

Partial list of complete CD performances

June 27, 8pm - CD Release Concert with Gamin on piri, Vasko Dukovski on clarinets, and Chris Cochrane and Richard Carrick on electric guitars, at the Either/Or Spring Festival, NYC.

July 23, 6pm - Complete CD Concert with Dan Lippel guitar, Zach Herchen saxophones and Stephanie Richards trumpet on Con Vivo’s Jersey City Parks Summer Concert, NJ.

March 6, 2015 - Complete concert, Richard Carrick and Nadav Lev on electric guitars, Vasko Dukovski on clarinets and Brad Balliett on bassoon.  Spectrum, NYC.

May 14, 2016 - Jaffa, Israel, Musica Nova and Richard Carrick.