#transgression!!!

Miller forges a path that veers between the blues and American primitive picking with these six exploratory pieces. On the surface, this seems to be at odds with the fire music bursting from the most recent releases of his Borbetomagus bandmates. Don Dietrich’s Option is a blown-out cacophony of noise, and Jim Sauter’s latest duet with Kid Millions for the Astral Spirits label is a free jazz maelstrom. Miller is capable of a considerable heft with his 12-string setup and is keen to show just how powerful he can be right out of the gate. “The Man in the Well” lurches from a few sparse chords into a swirling miasma of glittering steel-string churn. His fingers deftly pick out rapid-fire arpeggios and dance from string to string effortlessly as he creates hypnotic cascades of sound from the guitar. 

The guitarist isn’t shy from playing around with extended techniques, either. On “A Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconsciousnesses,” Miller trades in his e-bows for acoustically generated glissandi. Dedicated to avant-garde guitarist Davey Williams (R.I.P.), the piece eschews discernability, instead choosing to switch moods from roaring drone to violin-like see-sawing and back again. The guitar’s strings buzz strangely on “For I Am a Cat of the Devil I Am”, as Miller adopts a slide to rework a chord progression from Charlie Patton’s “A Spoonful Blues”. He mixes in some sprightly picking between returning again and again to the main descending blues theme. 

In addition to Williams, Miller dedicates songs to Jack Rose and “our beloved Squeaky Frome (sic).” The former is titled “A Pseudoragasque Pavanne” and gives both folk raga and American primitivism a wide berth. This is what the guitarist excels at: hooking onto genre signifiers without aligning too closely. With Transgression!!!, Miller has crafted a guitar style that is sui generis. The man can wrench just as much visceral power from a twelve-string acoustic guitar as he can from an amplified six-string axe, and that’s just plain cool.