Album Notes

Bart Hopkin has been playing solo guitar in live performance and recording situations since forever. He’s also a designer and builder of unusual musical instruments, director of the organization called Experimental Musical Instruments, and author of several books and CDs featuring unusual instruments. This CD, being a collection of guitar music, doesn’t have much in the way of far-out instruments, but it does feature several distinctive-sounding guitars that Bart has made.

Bart trained as a classical guitarist, and this CD includes three classical pieces: a couple written for early guitar, and a guitar transcription from one of the Bach violin partitas. But most of the material on here is not classical. It comes from all over the place – there’s some folky stuff, some standards, some things that Bart himself wrote. Bart’s particular musical perspective is the unifying element. The music is distinctive & fresh, tasteful and intelligent; warm enough yet spicy enough.