Biography

British guitarist Keith Rowe (1940) is one of the improvisors who has most contributed to the definition of a new vocabulary for the guitar.
Rowe began his career playing jazz in the early 1960’s and was a founding member of AMM in the mid-1960s (though in 2004 he quit that group for the second time) and a founding member of M.I.M.E.O. He trained as a visual artist, and Rowe’s paintings have been featured on most of his own albums. After years of obscurity, Rowe has achieved a level of relative notoriety, and since the late 1990s has kept up a busy recording and touring schedule. He is seen as a godfather of electroacoustic improvisation, and many of his recent recordings have been released by Erstwhile Records.

Rowe developed various prepared guitar techniques: placing the guitar flat on a table and manipulating the strings, body and pickups in unorthodox ways to produce sounds described as dark, brooding, compelling, expansive and alien.

He has been known to employ objects such as a library card, rubber eraser, springs, hand-held electric fans, alligator clips, and common office supplies in playing the guitar. Rowe sometimes incorporates live radio broadcasts into his performances, including shortwave radio and number stations (the guitar’s pickups will also pick up radio signals, and broadcast them through the amplifier).

Rowe has worked together with numerous composers and musicians, including Cornelius Cardew, Christian Wolff, Howard Skempton, Taku Sugimoto, Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M, Oren Ambarchi, Christian Fennesz and Peter Rehberg