Downtown guitarist Marc Ribot is a veritable shape-shifting sculptor of wild electrified sonics. Madly skilled in the Hendrixian arts of feedback, wack tunings, exotic scales and crisply shredded notes, Ribot’s recordings and performances are often as sensory exhaustive as they are musically satisfying (not a bad thing). Recorded in 1994, Shrek is firmly in the avant garde camp. Over ten tracks, Ribot and Shrek the band (Chris Wood, guitar; Sebastian Steinberg, bass; Christine Bard/Jim Puliese, drums) cause wreck, eschewing identifiably standard song structures for a blurry continuum of multi-layered sounds, skewed rhythms and extraterrestrial transmissions. An intense exercise in wild gravity, Shrek careens madly from the pointillistic Frippertronics of “Forth World” to the grim claustrophobia of “Romance.” Well worth the listen-just don’t look for a melody.
Marc Ribot: Shrek
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