Keith Rowe

Keith Rowe (b. 1940, Plymouth, England) began playing jazz guitar in the early 1960s before abandoning conventional technique — resolving one New Year’s not to tune his guitar again — to lay the instrument flat on a table and manipulate its strings, body, and pickups with objects including alligator clips, a library card, springs, and hand-held electric fans. A founding member of AMM in 1965, he developed this “tabletop guitar” practice into one of the foundational vocabularies of free improvisation, later extending it with radio static and electronics. Trained as a visual artist, he has used his own paintings on many of his album covers. Widely regarded as a central figure — sometimes called a godfather — of electroacoustic improvisation (EAI), he recorded extensively for Erstwhile Records, including long-running duo collaborations with Toshimaru Nakamura beginning with Weather Sky (2001).