In a town teaming with axeslingers and marauding guitar bands, sometimes the most notable six-string shredders are those that don't sound like they have an axe to grind. Case in point are the three local groups corralled into this week's Music section: "Guitar's Outer Limits." While Seven Percent Solution, Futura, and the Friends of Dean Martinez all share a certain futuristic aesthetic to their sonic explorations, all three acts do so in markedly different fashions. The trio of guitarists in Seven Percent Solution, for instance, bleed their leads into an open wound of sound, exposing pain and vulnerability with the building cries of their instruments. Futura's Travis Hartnett, on the other hand, throws up translucent walls of Frippian ambiance, the trio's turntablist Monte McCarter penetrating this veneer at every opportunity. Pedal steel player Bill Elm, channeling the spirit of Santo & Johnny in the Friends of Dean Martinez, shrouds his ghostly guitar sounds in Moog modulations and theremin tribulations. All radically different approaches, certainly, but at the core of each band stands a lone guitar resembling Stanley Kubrick's big black monolith. Do not adjust your stereo, then. These are "Guitar's Outer Limits." --
Raoul Hernandez
