From: Greg.Mills@JWT.com
The question I put to the collective genius of the assembly is this: What does Reichel's guitar work sound like?
Hans Reichel built his guitars (just as he built the daxophone). One of the features of Reichel's guitars is that the strings extend beyond the bridge, which allows for (i) secondary tones to be generated while playing in the traditional manner and (ii) playing on the wrong side of the bridge. This gives Reichel's guitar a unique and immediately recognizable sound. (As recognizable as D. Bailey; the instant you hear it, you can say, "This is Hans Reichel.") However relative to the bizarre sounds of his daxophone, the sounds of his guitar work are not quite as alien to this world. The style of Hans Reichel's guitar playing is (as I am sure you can guess from the fact that the bulk of his releases are on FMP) mostly improvisational. But Reichel's songs are improvisations on a melody. His songs are not harsh, not dissonant. On the contrary, they are some very beautiful melodies that snake their way through the improvisations. My recommendation for Reichel's guitar work is the split-cd "The Death of the rare bird Ymir"/"Bonobo Beach" (FMP, CD 54 1993 (1979/81), cd). This is two albums of his best playing on one cd. I have heard some people say that "Bonobo" (a distinct album from "Bonobo Beach") which was never reissued on cd, is his best album. Here I totally disagree. Surely Reichel had some input into which of the lps in his FMP canon were selected for rerelease on compact disc in the 1990's. He picked the best ones. It is easy to hear that the idiosyncratic techniques of guitar playing that appear on the earlier albums culminate in a mature and fully-developed style on "The Death of the rare bird Ymir"/"Bonobo Beach". My second recommendation (after this one) is the new daxophone cd on a|l|l, an imprint of FMP, titled "Yuxo". It's very interesting to see hear how Reichel's approach to the daxophone evolved in the intervening 10 years. If there can be any criticism of "Yuxo", it is that the album is too "studio slick", a claim which could never be made regarding his guitar albums since they are all (at least all the FMP ones), "recorded as heard, no overdubbing". David K.