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Hailed by Rolling Stone as “a genre unto herself,” composer and guitarist Kaki King is a true iconoclast. Over the past ten years, the Brooklyn-based artist has released six extraordinarily diverse and distinctive albums and performed with such icons as Foo Fighters, Timbaland, and the Mountain Goats. She has also contributed to a variety of film and TV soundtracks, including Golden Globe–nominated work on Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, and played to an increasingly fervent following of music lovers on innumerable world tours.
In addition to her own solo work, King sometimes performs accompanied by the string quartet ETHEL, based in New York City. She also recently premiered a classical piece commissioned by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer David Lang at Carnegie Hall.
The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body is King’s latest full-length album, which has turned into a groundbreaking new multimedia performance. It debuted at Brooklyn’s acclaimed BRIC Arts/Media House in New York City in 2014. Provocative and moving, surprising and beautiful, The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body is Kaki King at her visionary best: deconstructing and redefining the role of a solo instrumental artist through virtuoso technique, insatiable imagination, and boundless humanity. This performance uses projection mapping to present the guitar as an ontological tabula rasa in a creation myth unlike any other. It deliberately blurs the lines between sound and vision, and between musician and instrument.
Created in collaboration with Glowing Pictures—a visual design company best known for its work with such artists as Animal Collective, David Byrne and Brian Eno, Beastie Boys, and TV on the Radio—The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body lays bare the guitar’s inner life and protean power as well as its incalculable possibility and perpetual presence in our deepest unconscious. Luminous visions of genesis and death, textures and skins, are cast onto King’s signature Ovation Adamas 1581-KK six-string acoustic guitar customized specifically for this production. The guitar gradually evolves, taking on a living, breathing existence of its own.
“The guitar is a shape-shifter,” King says, “something that plays all types of music and really fills all kinds of roles. It’s not always the six-string guitar that we all know and love. I’ve been playing guitar for more than 30 years. It’s who I am and if anything, this project has made me even more familiar with it.”
With her latest album, she’s found yet another new way to do what she always seems to do—to find great music in a guitar and play it like very, very few people can.
—Huffington Post
New Guitar God.
—Rolling Stone
www.kakiking.com
