SOLO GUITAR: Roger Clark Miller & Mythless

The first collaboration between Newfane's Music at Union Hall and BMAC: Please join us in welcoming two boundary dissolving pioneers of guitar music for our September show. Roger Clark Miller and Mythless will deploy their unique set-ups in Union Hall for a performance that's sure to be unforgettable.

Roger Clark Miller

Roger Clark Miller is a guitarist, pianist, bassist, composer, singer, percussionist and occasional cornet player. He has been a band leader since 1967. His recordings have appeared on Cuneiform, Matador, Fire, Ace of Hearts, SST, New Alliance, Forced Exposure, Feeding Tube, Atavistic, Fun World, World in Sound, and others. He has toured nationally since 1979 and internationally since 1998.

His career officially began in 1979 when he co‑founded the influential post‑punk band Mission of Burma on guitar and vocals. The band is in Michael Azzerad’s book on indie rock Our Band Could Be Your Life. He is also the keyboardist for the Anvil Orchestra silent‑film composing ensemble, with recent shows at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Roger Ebert Film Festival. He has scored soundtracks that appeared at the Sundance and Telluride Film Festivals, and his art installation “Transmuting the Prosaic” has been at two different art museums. He has performed in too many different ensembles, and made too many wildly diverse records, to list them all.

For this concert, Miller will be performing compositions from his newest album on Cuneiform Records, Curiosity for Solo Electric Guitar Ensemble. He currently uses a customized Stratocaster 6‑string electric guitar and three lap‑steel guitars on stands—two of them loaded with alligator clips or bolts, the other tuned to a post‑Glenn Branca unison E. Using bass and tenor guitar strings, this melts his previous prepared‑piano ideas (Maximum Electric Piano) into more portable guitars, resulting in percussive grooves and bass‑lines. Combining advanced looping technology with new stomp‑boxes, many in stereo, he truly creates a “solo ensemble” sound.

To organize the compositions, he turned to his “Dream Interpretation” technique. By tightly following and translating a specific dream into music, a new type of structure was available—organic and personal, yet universal. Realizing the essentially surrealistic/psychedelic nature of dreams, the type of guitar sounds he was interested in now had an appropriate context.

On Curiosity he also revisited his “Natural Phenomena” composing technique, in this case using five photographs taken by NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover to structure the music of a longer composition—space music indeed.

From the press:

Pop Matters, Jan. 2023:

“His skills as a guitar player and his bottomless imagination have collided in a perfect encapsulation of the two traits, bringing forth a third strand that just can’t be imitated by anyone else, no matter how hard anyone should try.”