Posts Tagged ‘Bill MacKay’

BILL MACKAY – ” Fountain Fire “

Posted: February 17, 2019 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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In and out of focus in a hallucinogenic haze, Bill’s conversations with himself follow a travel-worn map copied over and over again. The picker journeys sonically from familiar to unknown places, a style suspended between the traditional and the avant-garde, expansive and flowing like boiled-over magma. Bill MacKay is a Chicago based guitarist-composer-improviser. He has energized experimental folk, rock, and avant-garde scenes with his radiant songs, and creative and unpredictable approach to the guitar.

Smoke signals, sirens, urgent messages Bill MacKay‘s six-string mastery pulses like a sun with (Sandy) Bull-ish psycho fusions on Fountain Fire, his second solo album for Drag City. The fire in the album title is a continuity in Bill’s life – part of his genealogy, his living history, his astrology and the scorching effect of the over-driven slide throughout the album! Bill melds slide, acoustic and distorted electric tones on Fountain Fire to explore the enigma at the end of a continent, civilizations that precede others, and how we all end up the same. MacKay also throws another element into play: a stark and emotionally-charged vocal number that causes the hair to raise on the listener’s neck with a haunting and eerie beauty. This number, “Try It On,” shows Bill has found a broader plane of expression than he’s ever revealed before, his voice expanding his songwriting into uncharted zones and territories

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releases March 22nd, 2019

Written, performed and produced by Bill MacKay 
Instruments: guitar, bass, piano, voice, percussion, organ, glass slide, requinto

BILL MACKAY and RYLEY WALKER – ” I Heard Them Singing Now “

Posted: August 13, 2017 in MUSIC
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Bill MacKay and Ryley Walker inspired collaboration continues with a 2nd volume of freshly baked tunes.
They call it, “SpideBeetlebee” , It’s been nearly two years since their much-admired 2015 debut, Land of Plenty (Whistler Records), and SpiderBeetleBee more than makes up for the long wait with a rich, resonant batch of performances that elevate the guitar duo’s sound into an ever-widening panorama of styles.

Their first album was developed over a month-long live residency at Chicago’s Whistler, reflecting MacKay and Walker‘s joy in their newly found playing relationship.As kindred spirits, they found in their playing the ability to wordlessly finish a phrase or suggest a direction while speaking solely through their guitars. SpiderBeetleBee continues fluidly through and beyond a similar path of psych-folk-blues-raga, brewing further explorations in mixed-and-matched idioms, turning composed melodies inside-out via improvisation, and finding in the blend a shared Walker/MacKay pasture, serendipitously located somewhere between Appalachian and the Highlands.
SpiderBeetleBee radiates forth with equal parts austerity and whimsy, as evidenced in the lead single “I Heard Them Singing”. Generating a nimble tempo with the aid of MacKay’s requinto (a kind of 5-string Mexican guitar), Walker’s rolling chords and the percolating tabla of Ryan Jewell, “I Heard Them Singing” suggests an unknown short-cut from Brazil to India!

Bill MacKay: 6 string guitar, requinto, glass slide
Ryley Walker: 6 & 12 string guitars

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