Binky Boy

Here is Nick Didovsky with four other guitar players, including Fred Frith, Mark Stewart, Rene Lussier, and Mark Howell. Largely it's a Didovsky solo disc with tons of overdubs and feedback and effects, but everyone but Stewart plays on "Black Iris," a six-string freakout heretofore unheard by mere mortals. And then there's Stewart, who plays duets with Didovsky on half the disc's tracks, which adds a kind of chilly lunacy in all the right places that makes this more of a guitar-at-the-circus-in-your-nightmares record than an art record proper. But mostly there's just Didovsky, totaling the soundscapes created by other players in favor of a microtonal sphere of electrical sonance that has only previously been explored by New Zealander Roy Montgomery — and though Montgomery may be more soulful at ripping through guitar sounds than Didovsky, he hasn't nearly the same sense of humor. This isn't to imply that with all this multi-tracking, feedback, and atonal winding and grinding, what appears on this album isn't music. Quite the contrary, in fact; Didovsky is so musical that his peers have a hard time with him, because unlike Davey Williams and that ilk, Didovsky isn't afraid of melody or pulsing rhythms or a tracking bassline in his improvisations.