Steve Watt and Neil Ayer
Too Much
© 2006 Wheel Of Earth (809001011929)
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A quieting musical meditation, relaxing and healing. Inpired by mathematics and fantasy, it's all guitars: one steel, one nylon, two Ebowed electrics, and a bass. "A dreamy delight".
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Meditative guitars from the dawn of New Age music.
If this album had been released in 1978 when it was recorded, it could have been an important early New Age album. The music comes from the experience of meditation and is concerned with fantasy themes and mathematics.
Steve Watt and Neil Ayer met in Denver, Colorado in 1977 and began playing acoustic guitar duets in local coffee houses and cafés. Steve is a classical guitarist while Neil’s roots are in blues, folk and progressive rock.
“Too Much” (one of Steve’s favorite expressions) was recorded in the mountains of Boulder, Colorado in 1978 on a TEAC four-track and the overdubs were done in Denver later that year. Initially, the performance was nearly an hour long and therefore “too much” for a vinyl album in the pre-CD age, so I started calling it “Too Much”. The name stuck, but ironically, after editing the tracks, only about 33 minutes of material survived.
The tape was mixed in 1978 for a few friends, again in 1984 for use on a video tape of fractal art by Art Matrix, and finally in 2006 for this CD.
Some of the tracks feature an electric guitar played with an Ebow. The Ebow is an electrical device that “bows” a single guitar string without touching it.
There is more information on the music of Steve Watt and Neil Ayer on my site:
www.wheelofearth.com
also
www.myspace.com/neilayer
Neil Ayer
12/28/2006
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- author: Allen B. Ray
Originally recorded back in 1978, the music on Too Much is stately, ethereal at times, introspective at others; at fleeting moments, it can become quietly unsettling, and yet, it remains wholly soothing overall. The choice of instrumentation, though very simple, comes off as extremely effective in the deft hands of these two fine young musicians. In particular, Neil Ayer's sensitively e-bow'ed electric guitar lines blend deliciously with the arpeggiated figures that Steve Watt caresses his classical guitar into playing on "Stepping Stones," and the understated, echoing lines that end "Rorquals" and tastefully punctuate "Rain Song Suite" are but two examples that leave this listener feeling pleasingly contemplative (and that last e-bow'ed bit in "Rorquals" could have gone on just a tad longer, in my humble opinion). Watt's sometimes-classical, sometimes-jazz-inflected style elicits a reflective response from this listener as it lays down its backdrop groove to form a stately, almost transparent landscape that effortlessly melds the otherworldly and the ethereal with the earthly and the organic. In this lovely work, I am reminded at moments throughout of original Genesis guitarist Anthony Phillips' sublime acoustic work, and here and there I also detect the the visiting spirit of Steve Hackett. All in all, the highly evocative Too Much - which, at 32:49, somewhat ironically ends up being on the short side of things - the artists' performing and composing skills speak with a delicate, peaceful, and reflective voice that stir corresponding sympathies in the listener. This CD represents a finely-nuanced piece of work that belongs in every self-respecting music lover's music collection.