Bill Thompson - Improfest - Ash International

 

Bill Thompson

Improfest

UK  Ash International  2026 - download

A live document of Bill Thompson’s streamed performance with his Moog guitar, live electronics and found objects at Improfest in February 2022. A sophisticated drone composition performed at London’s Rearview Studios, this is his latest work on London’s Ash International imprint. I previously reviewed Bill’s And The Sky Breaks Open from 2024 also on Ash International. You can read that here:

https://honestmusicfordishonesttimes.blogspot.com/2024/11/bill-thompson-and-sky-breaks-open.html

Initially, Thompson pivots from calming low-mids to diverting mildly overdriven high-end information with aplomb. This produces beautiful results, particularly in the first third of the piece. There’s a culmination of anxiety-inducing squeal shredding the nerves around the 12 minute mark before the piece collapses into a warm deep tissue massage of the cortex lasting long enough to put this listener into a very relaxed state. Here, there seems to be some kind of rotational action upon the strings of Thompson’s Moog guitar. A bell-like pulsing is then foregrounded while randomized squealing emerges from the distance. Before long something is dancing on the strings while oscillations build. Two thirds through, feedback is harnessed for texture, like an auditory approximation of the multi-coloured event horizon in Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey. Thompson tears melodic sparks from a building chaos. The final three minutes sound like a large tube amp blowing its valves until only a thin veil of pure tone and the idle manual tapping of guitar strings is left. Highly recommended.

https://billthompson.bandcamp.com/album/improfest

https://ashinternational.bandcamp.com/