Experimental Guitar

Experimental Guitar denotes music that treats the guitar as raw material rather than a fixed instrument: prepared strings, objects inserted between frets, bows, feedback, alternate tunings, tabletop playing and heavy electronic processing. Emerging from free improvisation and the avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s with figures such as *Derek Bailey*, *Fred Frith* and *Keith Rowe*, it extends into guitar orchestras, drone and noise practice. Technique is always subordinated to the discovery of unfamiliar sounds the instrument was not designed to make.