PRESS:

This beautifully presented LP is pressed in an edition of 425 copies, with every handmade sleeve featuring an original vintage American photograph. It's a live album from banjo/guitar modernist Paul Metzger, with two sides bookending his exploration of modified strings. The first comes from a church concert in Minneapolis in 2002. This was Metzger's first public outing for his modified banjo, and though it's not quite as gloriously outre as his later work - focusing more on an aggressive take on raga forms than on actual alternate soundings - it still makes for a wild ride, with the increasingly accelerated nature of Metzger's instrumental logic unfolding in waves of taut steel string. Unhappily there is a hand-drum section near the end that effectively sinks it.

The second side is fantastic, with two tracks recorded in Minneapolis in 2008. The opening piece, featuring a modified ten-string guitar with in-set cymbal, has the kind of alien string technology feel of some of Harry Partch's constructs, albeit with a pronounced, punk-primitive bass pulse and a leery feel that's more Edgar Breau than Edgard Varese. The closing banjo track is a version of the beautiful "Orans" from Metzger's 2007 Locust album Deliverance. It's a celebratory reading, balancing emotional exuberance, avant praxis and weight of meaning like nothing this side of Bola Sate 's timeless Takoma album, Ocean. Metzger's music perfectly balances technical smarts with the feel of a life lived, and makes for gripping instrumental art.
-- Wire, David Keenan

Anamnestic Tincture is a terrific document of former TVBC guitarist Paul Metzger's musical experiential shift over the last seven or eight years. The first side highlights Metzger's first sustained public debut of his treated banjo (it's strung and tuned like a sitar) at the 2002 Destijl Festival at the Church. Side Two contrasts that first performance with one at a memorial for Matt Zaun, drummer for Salamander and Di Dollari, in January, 2008.

The flurries of notes in "After Milo" (referring to his place on the festival's bill) evoke both the maximalism of Indian music and guitar army composer Glenn Branca, using a repeating motif that's part raga and part slide blues. Side Two's opener, "Dark Green Water," moves toward more austere compositional structures and time signatures while still keeping the banjo-pickin' fury intact. Most stunning is "Orans," played on a guitar using a cymbal as a resonator and strung with 10 different steel strings. The sound is blindingly metallic—like he's playing music on the side of the Weisman Art Museum with a nail gun—and yet delicate, in a way.

This limited-run LP, which is a vinyl-only release, is vital because it preserves memories in its grooves. It's bittersweet—the Desitjl festival is no more, the Church is shuttered, but you put this on, and someone's flicked a switch and you are transported back right to the source. Even if you never were there. It's that magic.
--City Pages, Cecile Cloutier

Until recently, Paul Metzger’s music enjoyed a bit of extra appeal simply because it was so hard to hear; his old electric band TVBC could go years between gigs, and for much of that time he didn’t even tell people about his solo acoustic work. But this is his third Chicago appearance in less than a year, and the new Canticle of Ignat/All Glass (Archive) is his third full-length release in that time. Familiarity makes it easier to get past the novelty—the Saint Paul native attaches sitar-style drone strings, music-box parts, and other objects to his guitars and banjos—and simply steep in the power of the sounds. The hard-tugged, solitary notes with which Metzger opens each piece might curl like lazily rising smoke or accelerate into a near pileup of breakneck runs; either way, if the flawless control he has over the music’s ragalike shape-shifting doesn’t get you, the knife-between-the-teeth intensity of his playing will.
-- Chicago Reader, Bill Meyer

Paul Metzger - "Canticle Of Ignat" (Canticle of Ignat / All Glass)

On Deliverance, the outstanding album that likely served as an introduction to the ways of Paul Metzger, the instrument of choice was a banjo. Not just any, of course – a 21-string mutant modified by Metzger himself. Anyone, however, who has delved further into the Minnesotan's discography knows that Metzger's arsenal isn't restricted solely to the banjo, and that an equally altered acoustic guitar is another trusted musical companion. On the 2007 tour undertaken to support Deliverance, Metzger split his set between the two instruments, and Canticle of Ignat / All Glass documents a pair of improvisations from a performance at BigJar in Philadelphia. The same aesthetic might inform Metzger's approach on the two instruments, but their natural differences, as well as those engineered by Metzger, translate into two different dialects within the same language. But, regardless of the strings that Metzger's plucking, his sounds certainly constitute a vernacular all his own.

That "Canticle of Ignat" opens with the splash of a cymbal is an unambiguous sign that this won't be like most other solo guitar performances. The rather large cymbal on the tail of Metzger's acoustic axe isn't its only unexpected appendage; the innards of a few music boxes cling to the instrument, a few extra strings run the length of the guitar, and various small holes and additions pepper its painted body. Metzger slides liberally up and down the instrument's fretless neck, marking much of the track with a thin twang not unlike that of the sitar. Accompaniment via the buzzing resonance of the guitar's lower strings is peppered with percussive striking of the instrument's body, and the track often moves in two parallel, though distinct paths. After an opening of solitary strings struck and bent, Metzger moves toward a one-man duet, combining folk finger-picking with deeper drones from the long strings. Even on his most furious runs, which tend to be relatively brief, Metzger's guitar work exhibits a spare quality, its tone rarely as rich as that of his banjo, the notes thin and metallic. Towards the track's end, the music boxes twinkly solemnly, calming the music before the track ends with perhaps its busiest burst of activity. When Metzger plays the guitar, the actual notes struck are only part of the sound, equally important are the buzzing resonance of the strings and the clatter of the instrument as it's played.

"All Glass," performed on banjo, is lush in comparison. The instrument's tone is fuller and warmer, and while Metzger's technique is often similar to what he uses on guitar, it's on banjo that he truly shines. Metzger begins by bowing the banjo, first in long tones, then interspersing a more rapid sawing with a slow succession of strummed chords. As the track progresses, Metzger segues into the raga-inspired playing that often marks his work, working from small clusters of notes into larger runs and back again. Near the track's halfway point, Metzger hones in on a melodic theme, accented by rhythmic tapping of the instrument's body, that coalesces into one of the album's most linear passage before giving way to a series of stabbing chords. Metzger seems more apt to explore melody and repetition on the banjo than on the guitar, providing "All Glass" with segments of momentum that aren't present in its predecessor. But, as ever, Metzger moves quickly, and any segment of the piece, whether spare and placid or more intense, isn't likely to last long. "All Glass" lacks some of the jagged edges of "Canticle of Ignat," but it's certainly not monotonous in tone or style.

It's hard to argue with the banjo-centric concentration on Deliverance, but Metzger's mix of instrumentation on this and other albums is a welcome one. The banjo may be the instrument on which Metzger has made his name, and his work on guitar may seem less exotic to those well versed in experimental sounds, but he's certainly no slouch on the six(ish)-string, either. Canticle of Ignat / All Glass is another in a line of excellent releases by a musician who seems unlikely to disappoint.
--Dusted, Adam Strohm

Paul’s guitar in the meanwhile has evolved to a further constructed, destructed and reshaped labyrinth of a house for new sounds. Extra holes, strings, and two music boxes are attached on top of it. The instrument, like a machinery of sound productions, now seems like an endless source for different sounds and ways to play it from a whole range of different angles. I hear also a bit of cymbal percussion but it’s not sure if this also wasn’t produced on the same instrument.* On the first track, a raga unfolds with brushes of percussion. The way of playing combines sliding, strumming, picking on the strings. This playing shows together special combinations of percussive strum-sound-effects of wood, resonating string bass effects, and all sorts of strange but balanced combinations tonal overtones from its strings. A few strings sound like coming from a double bass with a bigger resonance chamber, other strings sounds like more coming from a smaller resonance box, like a guitar. Also the musical box picked out tones have sounds fitting to the guitar playing, and are resonating into the resonance box of the guitar. These small picked notes are used at a certain stage to become part of the melody, as partial meditative pauses changing direction, before the plucked and strummed raga continues with occasional cymbal percussion. And where the raga evolves to more pushed forward moves, all these different layers of sounds continue to participate as different angles, multiple chambers of all sorts of string sounds and effects, like an instrument and its improvisation that shows itself as varied as a well balanced in sound combinations orchestra.

The second track is played on the modified banjo. Also this instrument is constructed perfectly, a bit less complex and more to the essence of its raga-purpose compared to Paul’s guitar. It sounds like an invention that once were the different raga guitars created for Indian music, but then more close to a sarod in nature than a guitar. The intro is played with a bow, like medieval instrumental improvisation, then picked, to remind more of a sarod with banjo-resonance. Also for this track an extra layer of fingerpercussion is added, and resonating bass strings, a rich combination once more, which directs its evolution in much more in time, through skilful playing, showing on its way beside its melodic power, also in the sound resonance a beautiful and rich variety consisting of low and wider range overtone resonances. Brilliant, as ever.
* later I heard there was attached a cymbal to the end of the guitar.
-- Psyche Van Het Folk, Gerald Van Waes

Gedanken Splitter is banjoist and instrument maker Paul Metzger’s first full-length for Roaratorio, following a split session with Chris Corsano and Ben Chasny. Metzger used to occupy a chair in TVBC, the Twin Cities’ answer to the Sun City Girls, and consequently his trajectory would seem parallel to Richard Bishop's. However, whereas Bishop’s records like Improvika and Salvador Kali are an amalgamation of folk-blues, ragas, and Greek, Arme nian, and South Asian music, Metzger’s vision is more singular. He's affixed a guitar head to his banjo and expanded its capacity to 21 strings, sometimes applying a bass bow to them, and his guitar is equal parts Charlie Nothing and Milford Graves, a hand-painted creation with a crash cymbal and music box parts attached. His music can remind you of a raga with its long intro ductory sections and spiraling modal fretwork, or suggest a careening de tuned front porch blues, but it’s often hard to relate what he’s doing to any familiar musical style. Cloudy subtonal flecks briefly recall Derek Bailey, but these fragments have a processional delicacy far apart from non-idiomatic improv. “Geschenk” is an entirely arco piece, the banjo turning into a frostbitten sarangi as Metzger bows it between his knees, while there's definitely a hellhound on his trail in “Zugentgleisung.”
-- Signal to Noise, Clifford Allen

If Paul Metzger's last album Deliverance evinced his yearning to free the banjo from the shackles of convention, Gedanken Splitter shows what comes after the chains hit the earth. To get to this point, the St Paul, Minnesota based musician has taken a circuitous route through Duck Baker inspired acoustic fingerpicking, jazz standards, punk rock, electric lmprov and years of solitary experimentation that focused as much upon his instruments as what he played with them. Most of his recent records, including this one, feature a banjo customized with a 12-string guitar head and additional strings splayed across the top half of its body; at last count they total 24. On Deliverance the unfolding progression and abraded drones of his long, structured improvisations posited a third dimension situated between the Cumberland Gap and the Khyber Pass, and "Geschenk", the relatively brief opening track on Gedanken Splitter, starts out in similar territory. Played with a bow, his banjo yields the sort of sounds you'd expect from a sarangi or esraj, but with a deeper, coarser resonance that shudders with tension. That tautness breaks with the first strum of "Zugentgleisung"; from there the music twists and shudders,making leaps as vertigo-defying as a tree-born primate on the swing. The sidelong title track is even more dizzying, alternating between breakneck variations on a series of arpeggios and brutally hacked leaps into Derek Bailey territory. The binding forces are the intensity and control of Metzger's attack, which is unmatched in the new American Primitive camp.
-- Wire

Metzger’s furious banjo virtuoso returns for another perplexing, yet rewarding set of avant-tantrums. Taking on percussive qualities as well as sounding like a mutation of sitar, steel acoustic, and banjo just, he’s restrung and modified his instrument to take on tasks it was never designed for, so his composition accounts for what he’s allowed himself to do as much as where his head is to bring it across. Since nobody else has ever written for this variation of the instrument before, a lot of what you hear on Metzger’s recordings takes this innovation into account, tempering clawhammer playing styles with what he’s been able to create outside of it, applying an atonal, clashing chord structure across prickly rhythmic playing. Use of space seems to be frowned upon, and few notes are allowed to ring out as Metzger thrashes away at his monstrosity, playing in uncharted territory and shaking up the audience in the process. Engaging but quite uneasy.
-- Dusted Magazine

Radio feature on Weekend America

Metzger is well-known for his modified banjo improvisations and compositions, but Maccaferri plays host to Metzger's deconstruction of strings. Rather than elegantly thought out pieces of fingerwork, the two tracks herein are the noodlings, scrapings, and pokings of a man extracting the sounds only the 4-year old in us could explore. It's the jubilant fun of picking up a guitar or banjo without knowing a note and moving your fingers across its frets as if you were typing or tying a shoe.
-- Electronic Voice Phenomenon

St. Paul's hermit string-bender I delivers the banjo from bondage. By Bill Meyer

When Paul Metzger gets on stage, the first things that catch your eye are his instruments. The 49-year-old St. Paul, Minnesotan's banjo has a twelve-string guitar headstock and a stegosaurus spine's worth of tuning pegs clustered between one and three o'clock on the instrument's body, which give it a full complement of 24 strings. His guitar sports a cymbal stuck onto one end; extra strings fan outfrom a second bridge, and perched above the sound hole are the naked innards of a couple music boxes. But once he sits down and starts to play, sounds trump appearances. Maybe he'll coax a slender tendril of sound from his rounded axe with an e-bow, drag sarangi-like cries from it with a real bow, or pluck a sunrise melody from it, each note bright and present for a moment, then gone. He could tug an impossibly low note from his guitar and sculfJt it into waves that you'd expect to wash from the shores of the Ganges, not the Mississippi, or loft a barbed, higher pitch through a lattice of randomly evolving music box tones. His dizzying improvisations can sound as splintered as a Derek Bailey standard demolition, as heavy as a punk rock rave-up, and hypnotic as a Hindustani raga, but he's more interested in seeing where his ideas and instruments take him than he is in evoking any particular influence. In fact, Metzger's acoustic music is the product of decades of solitary exploration. "I developed my style on my own in my little hermit world." Sitting in a Chinese restaurant before a recent gig in Chicago, he explained its evolution. "My first guitar playing was acoustic, I started as a finger-style player, listening mostly to Duck Baker and also Django records, and had my influences: North Indian music, jazz standards and the experimental thing. I was never interested in rock and roll music. This would be like mid 70s, you know? I was a very isolated guy and didn't know all the stuff that people who know about music knew about at that time period, like the Sex Pistols, but I didn't know anything about that. But then I saw the Replacements on local TV, right after their first album, and I just adored it. So I had a short period of emulation with the electric guitar, and that grew into getting back to what I had to say musically." TVBC, the now-disbanded rock group he originally formed with a brother and a cousin in 1979, gigged sporadically in Minnesota for over two decades. The trio's penchant for extended improvisation attracted some passionate admirers, but also ensured that they never fit into the Twin Cities' rock scene. Metzger simply assumed that his solo efforts would be even less popular. "I worked on my acoustic music at the same time, but kept it as an at-home thing as it became more and more experimental. I always assumed that no one would want to hear my acoustic playing." So he didn't bring it into the public eye until 2002, when he played the first DeStijl festival, and didn't make his first acoustic records until 2004. Those two albums, a solo guitar effort entitled Paul Metzger [Mutant Music] and Three Improvisations on Modified Banjo [Chairkicker's Union], introduced both the essential format and the dominant discourses in Metzger's music. Their winding pieces build up the same kinetic frenzy as a raga, but don't adhere to raga form. "That's what it kind of sounds like," Metzger admits, "but I'm not in any way trying to emulate that scene." Rather than follow a prescribed path, Metzger treats his open-ended compositions as vehicles to get lost. "To stretch things out and have a chance to make some mistakes, that is important to me. And to take a lot of chances, to not stay in a comfort zone. Within improvisation, you kind of know where to go, but I've always strived to find something else besides what I'm comfortable with." While Metzger generally brings both the guitar and ban/'o to his gigs, his choice to keep them fairly separate on record reflects the to and fro process by which he develops his music on each. "I approach it like being a painter and having a couple canvases that I'm working on. I take the one that I'm less satisfied with and work on that, and then the other one becomes less satisfactory." He's set to record two guitar records in the months ahead, but 2007 was a banjo year that yielded two splendid new LPs. Gedanken Splitter [Roaratorio] is ferocious, frantic, yet entirely on-course--easily Metzger's most aggressive waxing yet. The title track to Deliverance [Locust], on the other hand, may be his most eloquent and ambitious performance. It earns its halfhour length with a series of dark ruminations upon an exceedingly durable melody. The name nods, of course, toward the movie that introduced the world to "Dueling Banjos," but also attests to Metzger's missionary zeal for his round axe. "In my opinion the banjo is really in servitude, shackled down by very traditional art forms. A lot of them I really like, but I love the sound of the banjo so much, and it's so limited in its application. It's a bit of a shame, you know? I mean a guitar, that's all over the place. It doesn't need any help. The banjo needs a lot of stinking help. It's locked in tight." .
-- Signal to Noise

Entirely improvised, tangled with traces of raga, blues, flamenco and folk, Paul Metzger’s Deliverance extends and reinvents the possibilities of the humble banjo. Metzger’s instrument is heavily altered, with a dozen extra strings and a sitar bridge. It reverberates and bends notes in a way that has little to do with the flat, plainspoken tone of traditional banjo. Yet it’s a lovely sound, akin in its complex dreaminess to the wooden-guitar pyrotechnics of Jack Rose or Richard Bishop. Metzger seems to be playing two, or even three instruments in opener “Orans,” the high strings pinging a rapid-fire melody, while the lower ones building a scratchy storm of strums. “Bright Red Stone” is slower, more melancholy, bluesier, its ghostly tones and overtones hanging wispily over darkness. Metzger even turns his banjo, briefly, into a chamber instrument, as mesmeric violin-like bowing ushers in the title track.
--Harp Magazine

It's somewhat surprising that, despite being fraught with violence and emotional tension, John Boorman's 1972 Deliverance is best remembered for the image of a creepy inbred kid with a banjo and the simple melodic opening of "Dueling Banjos," the song made famous by the scene. Naming a record of solo banjo Deliverance 25 years later is something Paul Metzger couldn't have done unawares, but while the album's title might contain a nod to backwoods American folk tradition, its music taps into something more exotic. Metzger makes use of a rustic, roughly hewn Americana, to be sure, but Deliverance echoes just as frequently Indian ragas and other Eastern music traditions. The net effect is that of familiar sounds arranged in unfamiliar ways, a meditative strain that straddles genres effortlessly, in the end Metzger's music comes off naturally enough that attention is diverted from the specifics of his stylistic modes, with the music itself the focus. Many musicians can make music from a grab bag of influences, but it takes something more to do so in such a way that the conceptual act is overshadowed by the performance, and Metzger has done just that. Deliverance moves from meditative to fiery with ease, and it's this fluidity of intensity that is one of the album's best traits. And while, such as on opener "Orans," the soft to loud, slow to fast progression can be predictable, the spirit with which Metzger plays renders any such concern feeling superficial, at best. It isn't surprising that his banjo doesn't sound like what we expect, given that it looks like a mutant of its traditional form, modified heavily by Metzger to create a 21-string monster, sometimes bowed, sometimes plucked, that makes use of sympathetic drone strings a la some manner of alien sitar. But the novelty of his instrument isn't Metzger's primary appeal. In the end, it's the pathos of Deliverance that is at the album's core: the beauty of whirling melodies; the feverish successions of notes, climbing ever higher; and, ever present, the impassioned spirit that imbues it all. That a solo banjo record would be one of 2007's best was a bit of a surprise, but Paul Metzger has proven himself rather adept, to say the least, at thwarting expectations.
By Adam Strohm Dusted Magazine
--Dusted Magazine

A virtuoso on a myriad of stringed instruments, Minneapolis-based experimental/progressive folk artist Paul Metzger focuses much of his creative energy on his 21-string modified banjo. A student of both Eastern and Western traditional music, Metzger first appeared on a split album that featured guitarist Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance) and lauded improv drummer Chris Corsano on one side and Metzger's unique improvisational guitar work on the other. He released the full-length Three Improvisations on Modified Banjo for Chairkickers Music in 2005, followed by Deliverance for the Locust label in 2007.
-- All Music Guide, James Christopher Monger

Think about world music for a moment, and concentrate on the stringed instruments. What do you think of? Of course there's the fiddle, though that might be a little prosaic for some listeners' tastes. Still, it's an instrument that acknowledges virtuoso playing. The same can be said for other great instruments: the cora, the sitar, the shamisen and others. And now that list can be further extended with the most unlikely of additions: the banjo. Paul Metzger's playing takes you inside the banjo. To be precise, it takes you inside his banjo, a modified instrument that now features no less than 21 strings. His playing takes its cues from many different styles: sometimes you hear Appalachian picking, sometimes classical ragas, sometimes middle-eastern note bends. Most of the time, however, the music is simply Metzger himself, and damn, but he's good. Here's Orans from his recent album Deliverance. It's one of Metzger's more accessible pieces, as his banjo buzzes and fizzes with excess energy as he plays in a mesmerising raga style. Chances are, on listening to this you won't believe that a banjo can make the noises that you hear on this track. Several YouTube videos of Metzger's playing would beg to differ. If you like all these callow young men who play noodly acoustic guitar improvisations, take a listen to the real deal. My thanks go out to the fine people at Audiversity for opening my ears to this.
-- Dok (cyberinsekt)

Anyone who makes an album of solo banjo recordings and then calls it Deliverance is just asking for trouble. Presumably Metzger's larking around with us a bit there, because in truth this is no porch-mounted rocking chair noodle-fest, but rather a measured, meditative study of Metzger's own self-modified 21-string banjo performances, which have more in common with the revamped ragas of John Fahey and his fellow Takoma luminaries than any traditional, countrified usage of the instrument. Metzger takes his music far closer to the source than most open-tuned raga explorers, with some far-flung eastern harmonies that border on sitar drone and a furious picking technique that sounds quite unlike anything so humdrum as a banjo. By the time Metzger arrives at the final phase of his half-hour long title piece you'll find yourself thinking you're hearing some kind of advanced shamisen workout, characterised by a flurry of high speed, unsustained string plucks. It's impressive enough that Metzger should be a virtuoso of any instrument, but the very fact that he's mastered something he made himself as a one-off is even more remarkable, and consequently Deliverance is a pretty unique listening experience.
-- BOOMKAT

Maybe more than any other modern American instrument, the banjo is subjected to stereotypes; and for most modern/progressive music fans, derogatory stereotypes. Its tinny, twangy sound is almost synonymous with the Appalachian Mountains of the United States, a region that was once revered for its gorgeous landscapes and insular culture. Then came along a little movie by the name of Deliverance in 1972, in which the portrayal of the mountainous Georgia wilderness was, to put it lightly, creepy and disturbing. And maybe the most instantly recognizable scene of the film features a mentally-challenged hillbilly youth named Lonnie whose rendition of “Dueling Banjos” pretty much forever condemned the banjo to be associated with that eerie, uncomfortable setting for most of the movie’s viewers. On top of that singular pop culture event, the instrument is almost unanimously linked to the bluegrass and country genres. The history of the banjo runs much deeper though. In fact, it is a direct link to Africa’s influence on modern American music. It is believed that its evolution began when African slaves in the American south sought to recreate familiar instruments from their homeland such as the akonting or xalam of West Africa. In the nineteenth century, similar instruments were used in the blackface minstrel shows to represent “slave music”, and Joel Walker Sweeney developed its modern day form in the 1840s when he sought to “remake the banjo into an instrument for the middle class”. Over the next century-and-a-half, the banjo would become more and more associated with the American south with its idiosyncratic sound and eventually be a central characteristic of bluegrass and country genres that developed along side it. Over the last few decades, the banjo has been utilized more and more in different musical settings, ranging from the European jazz of Django Reinhardt in the 1940s to its increasing use in today’s indie-pop fusions. Minneapolis-based experimental folk artist Paul Metzger is forcing the instrument into brand new directions, both structurally and stylistically. His modified banjo is that of Frankensteinian mutation: the traditional pot-like body stays the same but with twenty-one strings instead of the traditional five and the elongated bridge of a sitar. Stylistically, Metzger rarely plucks in the circular, twangy fingerpicking we are most familiar with this instrument, but plays in an almost modal raga style with heavy influence from Northern India, Eastern Asia, jazz and folk. It’s a sound that echoes of Reinhardt, Sandy Bull and Henry Flynt, but remains insular and idiosyncratic due to the singular nature of his instrument of choice. The banjo’s stereotypes are not lost on Metzger as he chose to call his first full-length for Locust, Deliverance, perhaps with a bit of a snicker and a soft roll of the eyes. Consisting of three tracks in a nearly sixty minute set, the album features real time performances of Metzger solely on his modified banjo. The opening number, “Orans”, is both the strongest of the three songs and the most accessible. Leaning heavily towards the raga side of Metzger’s sound, he patiently swirls the styles of Bull, Ravi Shankar, Gabor Szabo and Robbie Basho into a spellbinding fifteen-minute workout. Metzger’s banjo features a much heavier low end than the traditional sound of the instrument and leads the song with a lyrical bass line ornamented with flourishes of the tinny high end. With increasing urgency as the track proceeds, he patiently builds the song’s momentum before the last three minutes’ onslaught of speed-picking up and down the raga’s scale creating cascades of metallic tones that reminisce of the sitar but with more of an unsettling nature. The ten-minute “Bright Red Stone” follows. This time leading with higher pitches, Metzger’s banjo sounds a bit closer to what you would expect from the instrument, but he rarely settles into any kind of countrified groove. The lyrical picking of Fahey is there as well as a modal jazz feel as he experiments with different approaches to playing a scale, all the while lined with a pulsing redundant strum that keeps the music from meandering. Finally, the title track runs for a whopping thirty-minutes. It opens with Metzger bowing his banjo creating an odd, aching Eastern sound that you might expect on an early 70s Pharoah Sanders release. With much less urgency than the prior two tracks, Metzger patiently feels out the tune, somehow connecting the Appalachian Mountains to Northern India and Far East Asia. It may be tolling for listeners with less of an attention span, but rewards in its curious fusion of styles and hypnotizing, almost soothing aura. Like most Locust releases, Deliverance is for music fans that want to furrow their brow while listening to music. With the quickly crowding school of post-Fahey guitar players these days, Metzger is a welcomed departure as he looks to expand the reaches of Fahey’s country ragas not only with a completely singular instrument in his modified banjo, but in his approach to a more modal style of playing. This is music to lay back and ponder over. It can at times hypnotize and even lull, but there is so much curiosity to the sound, it rarely loses your attention.
-- AUDIVERSITY

Minneapolis veteran Paul Metzger is a very worthy heir to the mystic throne of late acoustic-guitar shaman Robbie Basho. Using a variety of retooled banjos and other multistringed implements—not to mention absolutely stunning technique—he creates sweeping, swirling 21st-century ragas.
-- Time Out New York

Metzger, of St. Paul, Minn., will headline, playing banjo and guitar, both of which have been heavily modified. The banjo features extra sets of strings and is set up similarly to a sitar, which is a long-necked lute with a varying number of strings. "I prefer instruments that are not precious or fancy or expensive," Metzger said. "I just feel at liberty to experiment on them. I think 'what if I drilled in here or added something here.' I don't feel like I'm ruining something, I just kind of go at it." Metzger's most recent album, Deliverance, was released in October, and contains three banjo pieces, he said. Metzger said he doesn't listen to his own recordings, which are done in one live take, and focuses more on live improvisation. Nathaniel Rasmussen, a Schlow computer systems administrator, said Metzger "definitely got extremely emphatic applause when he played here before."
-- Collegian Pa.

Making Waves: Paul Metzger
EVP has kept a close eye on Metzger when we first noticed his contribution to a split LP with wunderkinds Ben Chasny and Chris Corsano. The hunt was on for Metzger's other forays into musicdom and while his releases are few, they are powerful salvos of modified banjo and guitar ragas brimming with influences both far and wide. We'd rather not cheapen Metzger's latest release, Deliverance, by spouting off useless adjectives describing the music as eastern, western, rock, folk, avant or psych. It's clearly all of those and yet it's none of them. Metzger has blurred the line between genre and product to deliver an album that's made for receptive ears. Nothing about Deliverance or any of his albums is off-putting. There's no harsh noise, no blasts of drone, and no tangents into psych jams. Metzger's work is the essence of one man, one instrument (in the case of Deliverance, the instrument of choice happens to be a modified 21-string banjo).
-- Electronic Voice Phenomenon

Although produced by Alan from Low, this is not what one might expect from his label - more the likes of Revenant, Tzadik or Unheard Music. Three extended pieces for solo banjo that have a melancholic yet authentic Deep South feel about them... absolutely terrific stuff that fans of John Fahey simply have to hear!
-- Smallfish Records

Paul Metzger may just be one of the finest American instrumentalists alive today. His newest album “Deliverance,” released this month on Locust Music, is a mind-blowing epic of modified-21-string-banjo improvisations. Metzger’s skill and genre-defying sound manages to place him in a realm somewhere far beyond mere-psychedelia, into the world of universal musical-dialogue, where the mind struggles to place what it’s hearing, be it Appalachian folk, or Classical Indian raga, or some sort of progged-out weirdness. Don’t let your definition-biased mind fool you. To simply call Metzger’s music an “East-meets-West” type situation would be far too simplistic, and miss the nuances Metzger brings to his own unique style of playing. There’s something much deeper at work in his songs, something exciting and frustratingly ineffable. A quick glace at any of Metzger’s live performances on YouTube will back up such bold declarations. Better yet, check out any of his fine records, which include a split with Ben Chasny and Sunburned Hand of the Man drummer Chris Corsano on Roaratorio. A veteran of the Minneapolis/St. Paul music scene, Metzger played for a number of years in the cult favorite experimental rock-trio TVBC, a band that, rather awesomely, released its own soundtrack to the 1929 classic silent film “The Man With the Movie Camera.” I spoke with Metzger about his decision to play solo, about several musicians he holds dear, and his composing and recording processes.
-- Accompanying interview--

A beautiful blend of cosmic sounds plucked, picked and strummed by Paul Metzger -- and every note of it done on the banjo -- albeit a modified 21-string banjo! Metzger delivers us from everyl Americana, jazz and hillbilly banjo conventions you can think of, but he doesn't sacrifice melody or listenability the way so many of his modern avant garde peers do. He sometimes approximates the sounds of other stringed instruments, from the sitar to the mandolin, and the tunes build to pretty intense moments. Beautiful stuff! 3 lengthy tracks that run nearly an hour all together: the 14+ minute "Orans", the nearly 10-minute "Bright Red Stone" and the 31+ minute "Deliverance".
-- Dusty Groove

A virtuoso if there ever was one, Paul Metzger received minor attention after releasing a split LP with Ben Chasny and Chris Corsano. He should receive quite a bit more for “Deliverance,” his first outing for Locust Music, as it shines and stuns like little else you’re likely to hear all year. With 3 long solo improved raga-tunes plucked and bowed on his very own 21-string modified banjo, Metzger seems to have grown as a performer since 2005’s (also wonderful) “Three Improvisations on Modified Banjo.” While that record moved by a bit more understatedly (while perhaps only in comparison), “Deliverance” is indeed heady, genre warping (creating?) stuff. That Metzger is able, both through his instrumental creation and his mind-blowing proficiency, to bridge a gap somewhere between Eastern and Western traditional music forms and sounds is no small feat. It’s universal and individual, and easy to get lost within. While traditional ragas generally require a fair share of patience to be fully appreciated, the beauty and strength of Metzger’s compositions are immediate. Ever twisting, changing, and snaking along into unexplored regions, these tracks don’t require repeated listens, but definitely reward them in the long run. Metzger can pick, and note follows note at an almost dizzying pace at times. It’s always to good effect, however, and no aura of showing off ever comes into view. Metzger’s ability to simultaneously soothe and stress is a large part of this disc’s success. The unease and tension present throughout the album’s middle piece, “bright red stone,” is instantly allieviated by the sad bowed strains of the title track. And while these songs are best taken as a complete movement, each one plays like a universe unto it self, echoing thousands of years of history, and hopefully lighting the way to a bright future for not only Metzger, but any of us willing to follow the paths he treads. With 2 more releases on the way, one of which, to be released on cassette, is “solo guitar improvisations based on thelonious sphere monk's bemsha swing performed on a plastic maccaferri guitar with attached cymbal and accompanied by 21 prepared music box mechanisms.” Deliverance, indeed. 9/10
-- Jon Pitt, Foxy Digitalis

On "August," his side-long contribution to a recent Roaratorio split LP with the duo of Ben Chasny and Chris Corsano, Metzger plays a guitar with a similarly large complement of strings, which he's further customized with the guts from a couple music boxes--their stark chiming provides a succinct counterpoint to his dramatic flamenco-style strumming and swooning slide licks.
--Chicago Reader

Ready to purge your ears of holiday music? Try Paul Metzger's improvisations on modified guitar and banjo. You'll spend a few delightful minutes trying to pinpoint influences (we spent an hour arguing koto, shamisen, or tar as if we know yona nuki from raga) before allowing Metzger to be Metzger and appreciating his "I'll do it my way, thank you very much" approach to music.
--Modern Guitars magazine

Eventually Metzger's guitar grows louder and heavier and by the end
you get something that has the spare alien beauty of an Ennio
Morricone Western soundtrack.
--Cadence

Paul Metzger has graced Minneapolis with his guitar and banjo playing in various contexts for over twenty years, but this is the first time I've encountered him. On the strength of his side-long performance here, that's a serious deficit. Many Westerners borrow a few elements from raga styles, and a few musicians from other disciplines are serious students of Hindustani and Carnatic lore, but Metzger's guitar playing sounds like the real thing. And yet it's true to the what-the-fuck spirit that's motivated the best punk, jazz, and free music of any stripe. John McLaughlin had his guitar fitted with scalloped frets and sympathetic strings; Metzger has pimped his ride with music boxes. They somehow keep up a running dialog with his dramatic strums and swooning slide licks that sounds so a propos that the word gimmick never finds its way into the conversation. "August," which also lasts the whole side, is like a long fading glow, a sunset raga worth returning to over and over again.
--Bill Meyer, Signal to Noise

Paul Metzger customisé his banjo! In fact it customise all that it finds banjo, guitar etc… the advantage it is that he makes use of it well. Its work is based on the improvisation, tinted influences at the same time Eastern, but also, like Steven R Smith, Slavic connotations. It is difficult to believe that with a simple banjo one can hold in breath his listener along more than fifty minutes, but it is what succeeded in making Paul Metzger, with in more one impressive masterliness. The notes are connected either at the speed of the flash, or with softness and touch. Glimmers of hope, or a dark despair you will pass by all the emotions, by great flights with more intimate passages. In addition to feeling the great control of the instrument, one notices also the desire for going to cause the emotion. Its improvisations are not that a series of notes without logic, for him the principal goal is to be able to isolate to us from the elements surrounding, to find itself just opposite this man playing on an adulterated banjo, the eyes plunged in the vacuum and the nimble fingers. A very beautiful disc of guitar, to listen with the helmet as much as possible to immerse you in the beauty of these some notes. By thanking you.
--Vincent, A Decouvrir Absolument

What does a modified banjo look like? Paul Metzger added more than a dozen strings, a sitar bridge and mutated the traditional backwoods instrument into something rather alien. The sounds that escape from this modified banjo are anything but alien. In fact, his instrument resembles a sitar more than a banjo. Highly meditative music, appropriately enough Metzger chose to record this music inside of Sacred Heart Music Center, which at one point was actually a church. Mix of folk, jazz, eastern music, country and improvisation creep their way into his way of playing. He's a demon one minute - plucking wildly with severe intensity - while for the next stretch, he'll just pluck single notes. This is in fact the most satisfying part of the record. Its singular take on modal structures and harmonic repetitiveness allows the listener to fall into a comfortable trance. This is not to say the music is dull in the least. It's just that its greatest strength is an overwhelming trance-like quality that allows everyone to look inwards. I love the way he surprises the listener with a mix of paradigm shifts and angular plucking attacks that appear and disappear at will. This is uncompromising improvised music of the highest calibre and a personal discovery of this year so far.
--Tom Sekowski, Gaz-Eta

For his half of this split LP, Metzger improvises on modified guitar rather than banjo, adding some tambura, and the results are a delicious slide into the void. I always dug his group TVBC, but Metzger has discovered a whole new country with his recent solo recordings.
--Byron Coley, The Wire

"On the absolute flipside is the reward one gets from spending time with
Paul Metzger's Four Imrovisations on Modified Banjo and Guitar 2LP set
(Metzger). Like the earlier work of this Twin City instrumentalist, the
music here is brilliant long form acoustic exploration of the cosmos outer
tears, free from cliche' and dullness. Without falling into any very
specific "known camp" (although some of the banjo work does recall Billy
Faier's Raga LP on Takoma), Metzger really ranges all over the aether,
producing one of the most satisfying string whomps of this or any season."
--Byron Coley & Thurston Moore, Arthur

A long slow burning raga woven from buzzing steel string drones, dense and deftly interwoven, over the top, simple Eastern melodies, that also buzz and rumble, and above it all soft crystalline chimes from the modified music boxes, adding a bit of subtle sparkle and dreamy melody to the dark and moody minor key raga-scape beneath. Really cool.
--Aquarius Records

...features some amazing post-Sandy Bull devotional raga that's as skewered and hand-made as anything released by Harry Partch's Gate 5. Metzger plays a modified guitar with a music box and accompanying tambura. Highly recommended.
--volcanic tongue

Paul Metzger's "August," an improvisation on modified guitar, fiddles with the high and low ends of an instrument rigged with chiming music box parts and balanced only with stringed tambura. The Minneapolis-based musician recently overhauled a banjo with sitar pick-ups for a similarly spiritualized effect. Here, he flows between folksy lament, minimal harmony, and a trickle of objects to the floor. Intentional or not, it adds percussion. Metzger is the right co-conspirator for the release, even if there's no interaction between the musicians. If only he could reach around to the flip side of the vinyl and add strong picking to the duo's fuzzy miasma. Instead, Metzger closely echoes Derek Bailey's sweetly obscured Ballads—re-arranging familiar melodies into a study, a negative proof of a color portrait.
--Kate Silver, City Pages

I hope I'm making myself abundantly clear when I say this - this is a very recommended experimental acoustic artifact.
--Matt Shimmer, Indieville.com

...the resulting sounds provocatively collide traditional American music with North Indian Hindustani music.
--Justin Schell, New Music Box

Metzger creates otherworldly sounds unique unto themselves. His long, elaborate gypsy raga improvisations are skillful sonic meditations that sound both ancient and fresh in their immediacy.
--Centre Daily Times, PA

Some of the most inventive (and brilliant) playing I've heard in a long time.
--Neddal Ayad, Foxy Digitalis

... sounds as intimate as a prayer, yet the open space surrounding the musician is practically an accompanist.
--Kate Silver, City Pages

Paul Metzger added 16 strings (!) to his 5-string banjo in order to play his raga-like music, which can be heard on his release "Three Improvisations on Modified Banjo." The extra strings function mostly as sitar-like sympathetic drones, with a bone bridge to help them resonate. I caught one of Paul's performances recently and was blown away by his trance-inducing 45-minute improvisation. Experimental? Wacky? Paul's combination of strummed, fingerpicked, tapped and bowed playing is banjo picking the likes of which you've never heard.
--Donald Nitchie, Banjo Newsletter

Metzger’s 23-minute opening track begins with distant, flutelike sounds that evoke a Buddhist temple rising to meet the morning sun. Soon after, he establishes a line of forceful plucks that get massaged, inverted, destroyed, and rebuilt. Mixing the rapid-fire picking of Django Reinhardt with the reverent raga of Robbie Basho, Metzger lets his own pulse dictate his music’s rushes and retreats. The middle track is almost a ballad, carving a winding river through a deep, dark forest. Three Improvisations ends with Metzger’s most ambitious piece—26 minutes of thoughtful strums and aggressive chords that suggests the amazing sounds here are just a fraction of the noises filling Metzger’s mind.
--City Paper, Baltimore

"It takes a mesmerizing sense of creativity to play a modified 21-string banjo. For one person to simultaneously slap the instrument's base for percussion and use his five other fingers to pepper the high-pitched strings on the banjo's north pole. To extract a chilling thunder from an instrument widely known for its light, chirpy sound. To make one instrument sound like a chamber of harps, bongos, sitars and violins feverishly swaying, skipping, stirring, churning and burning into an unpaved musical frontier. Minnesota musician Paul Metzger did just that. And the footprints his performance left marked the first steps of a new underground live music venue in York County a forgotten and refurbished 100-year-old ballroom in the Red Lion skyline.
--Flip Side, PA

Once the ears of the world were ready to return to the solo guitar innovations of John Fahey , roughly around the time Rhino released the two-CD retrospective Return of the Repressed , there were a number of players who lined up with guitars in hand to revive his particular style of fingerpicking fusion . Some merely replicated his country blues ragas , others tried to update the sound with laptops or placing a choice phrase within a bigger modern rock puzzle, but few have been able to truly add to the language that he laid out so fully from the late '50s to the early '80s. Three Improvisations on Modified Banjo is one of those few recordings that burns away the brush and forges ahead into new territory. That's not to say that it isn't without precedent. Paul Metzger 's banjo modes include a set of sitar-like sympathetic strings on the body similar to what John McLaughlin did with his guitar in the '70s, and he dips into Eastern raga patterns like Fahey , Robbie Basho , and many other guitarists have too. What does set him apart, other than his chosen banjo, is a patient, expansive sense of phrasing that has few Western peers. The album is made up of three long untitled pieces, the opener and closer each passing 20 minutes with the centerpiece ending just short of ten minutes. The first improvisation opens with soft drawn-out tones, and if it weren't for the occasional string buzz, it would be easy to mistake it for the sound of a wood flute. The other two pieces are more easily recognizable as products of a banjo, with the second drawing from American roots for a spare and relaxed front-porch meditation. The final improvisation draws on Eastern influences with an overlaying raga structure but also displays some moves that would not be out of place on a Andrés Segovia album, or a Derek Bailey recording, for that matter. Masterful and sublime through and through, this is a record that will have more than one day in the sun as it passes from one impressed set of ears to another.
-- Wade Kergan, All Music Guide

"There's enough Midwestern strangeness and unusual attack stub-dangling that you might imagine you were listening to a Rick Bishop album or something."
--Arthur

"The music Metzger makes—whether he’s strumming, fingerpicking, plucking or bowing—is unlike any Americana you’ve ever heard. From one moment to the next, Metzger’s banjo can sound like a violin, koto, flute, oud or sarod, and though these three solo improvisations are listed separately, each one flows seamlessly into the next, like one long raga that takes the album’s full 58 minutes to build, climax and fade into silence."
--Magnet

"Don't let the title fool you: Three Improvisations on Modified Banjo is about as far from Deliverance as you can possibly get."
--Splendid

"This acclaimed Minnesota-based string musician performs dreamy, meditative, at times ecstatic improvisations on a modified banjo and a fretless guitar fitted with sitar drone strings."
--Ann Arbor Observer, MI

"Metzger finds an accessible pulse in an ancient, refined form, and a meditative austerity in an earthy, vernacular one. Then he fuses both elements into glorious, soaring new structures."
--City Pages, MN

"Metzger has located a quivering space between the raga open-string drone and the ear-warping harmonic meditations of Tony Conrad, and the combined logic puts us both out of time and right in the body of the misshapen instrument."
--Pitchfork

"Its a very very hypnotic listen as it slowly gains your attention. An album that really needs to be listened to, as any attempts to explain the music will not do it any justice really."
--Road Records, Dublin

"fantastic recital of post sandy bull acoustic trance-inducing psychedelia..."
--Mimaroglu Music, MA

"flute-like at times, others like a mandolin. The best banjo playing ever."
--WFMU, New York

"This quiet, gently tangled and explorative disc features an absolute master working at his best. His hypnotizing, circular playing is rich without being overdone, non-violent without disappearing into the background, abstract while retaining deep emotion. As darkly beautiful as your favorite John Fahey record."
--Jackpot Records, OR

"It is without doubt that "Three Improvisations On Modified Banjo" is destined to be one of the very best and most essential experimental acoustic releases of 2005."
--Beautiful Day

"A release that will reward everyone who purchases for a long time."
--The Unbroken Circle, UK

"A strange and lovely acoustic oddity"
--Downtown Music Gallery, NY

"This release is also amazing!! A must !!"
--Psyche Van Het Folk, Antwerpen, Belgium

NEW LP "ANAMNESTIC TINCTURE"



Anamnestic Tincture is released in an edition of 425 copies, with an original vintage snapshot mounted on each cover; view a gallery of selected photographs.