Search - Brian Butler :: Axuality Volume I

It's slick and smart guitar, highly improvised, and it's like listening to an old friend tell you how cool you've always been. Smart guitar that makes a smart listener. It should appeal to deeper thinkers, and more serious people. I play guitar like I talk. Sometimes I trip over a word, but I mean exactly what I say. Honest guitar for honest thinkers. Have this music on while you're thinking. See how the thinking goes. ****************************** This music has been tagged Axuality for a definite reason. First of all, it is a pun on 'ax', which of course is musician slang for guitar or other instrument. More importantly, it is a pun on the word 'actuality', which I'd like to explain with regard to this music. I have been a professional improvisational guitarist for 15+ years. That means that almost every time I have picked up my guitar, I have made up the music right there on the spot. I have played maybe 200 songs in this entire 15 years. Everything else that I have played has been made up as I was playing it. Let me illustrate something. If you and I were to carry on a conversation, you would be improvising your words and I would be improvising my words. We would both be making up what we say, as we say it, duh. But if I was responding to everything you said by reading a line from a random speech, there would be some sense that I wasn't really 'there' with you. What I am saying here is that some communication, to make the most sense, or be the most ACTUAL, MUST be ad-libbed, not written ahead of time. Hence, since I am improvising to a high degree, the name Axuality. What does 'axuality' mean? Axuality is a style of music like rock or pop or jazz or metal. So far in this world, the word 'style' refers to what a music IS, such as when it may mean loud and with a solid beat as in the case of rock. But let's extend the meaning of the word 'style' so that it can also refer to what a music DOES instead of IS. Axuality is a style of music which is improvised to a very high degree. For those of you who would be turned off by this news, let me say that the music sounds very normal though. It is not some off-the-wall, weird sounding thing like improvising often produces. In the case of Brian Butler's axuality, it most often sounds like some kind of rock, jazz, movie, bluesy mix. Axuality is a style of music, which when approached with non-agenda-driven listening, will affect the thinking of the listener, encouraging his thinking to free up. When the listener's thinking is encouraged to be free of limitation like this, is when the listener tends to drift towards what is true. And down deep we all know that it's true that each of us is cool in a way that only WE are. So 'Axuality' is an instance of guitar expressing this actuality to the listener. Now what in the name of sanity could cause someone to believe that the music can do this? It is based on the fact that the music is to a very high degree improvised. The freedom of thought and action which are the driving force behind true improvisation, actually rub off on the listener. Period. New music buyers need music that is there and is honest; that speaks to you instead of recites to you.