Elder statesmen of abstract American guitar music, Loren Connors and Scott Tuma are distant but kindred spirits - two beautiful dreamers who have patiently wrung heart-rendering works of fragile beauty and harrowing despair from their instruments for decades. A shared affinity for America's musical heritage as well as for for the works of abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko have been common threads running through the work of both artists.
Like Rothko before them who built from classical forms to create a new language in painting through vast, expressive fields of opaque colors, Connors and Tuma have similarly built from elemental foundations - Connors from the blues and Tuma from traditional folk - to respectively improvise and re-create their own distinctly austere palettes of ethereal sound. Analogous to painter’s shrouded dark walls of color that make grave first impressions before giving way to radiant luminosity, the artists here plumb the depths of sepulchral stillness to find them not empty but echoing with spectral memories full of human familiarity and humbled enchantment. As the painter thinned his oils to let the ‘inner voices’ of his work shine through, so too do Connors and Tuma give way to silence and space where their music exists in abstract emotional realms that precede conscious thought.
One time short run edition of 150 designed by Chicago artist Ben Chlapek with artwork featuring photo's from the artists, their family and friends.
