The band formerly known as Cantrip is now Authentic Luxury!



I was doing a bunch of one off gigs, both tribute type gigs like covering a Frank Zappa record, Marc Ribot, John Coltrane, or Black Sabbath, or even doing original material. I was having a blast working on all of it, but was kinda bummed to be putting in a ton of work for just one gig so the cantrip project was initially a way for me to return to some material in a stripped down guitar, bass, and drums format, but with different drummers and bass players for each gig, but I was enjoying the project a lot and it made sense to be a way to explore some compositional, philosophical, and structural ideas within a post modern shred guitar power trio format. All of the rhythm sections were special and unique in their own way , but It really came together with Chris Icasiano(Bad Luck, Ings) on drums and Mike Murphy(Moon Letters) on bass as the rhythm section, playing with them sounded the closest to the music in my head. Cantrip became more of a post modern shred guitar thing once I had gotten deeper into loud guitar sounds and really made sense as a way to explore some compositional, timbral possibilities of the electric guitar, various attempts at liminal states,

Why shred guitar? The much maligned format of shred guitar is something I grew up on and aspired to in the first few years I started playing guitar: Van Halen, Steve Vai, yngwie maalmsteen and all those hilarious guys. When I was first learning guitar Steve Vai ( and then Frank Zappa, which led to all kinds of new trouble) was my favorite. He made It cool to have great technique, know how your instrument works, and know some music theory and just in general not be the dumb rock guitar guy cliche. He made it ok to be a weirdo and be smart about it while still being rock and still being heavy. A couple years ago I started checking a bunch of that music out again and found myself really enjoying the guitar playing, but really not digging the arrangements or what the rest of the bands were doing at all. It’s really just guitar music, most of it was written on guitar and is very “guitaristic” to play( in that it falls under the fingers in a very natural way). After being totally into it years ago and then leaving it and becoming obsessed with jazz, new western art music , and various types of Improvisation it’s really interesting to me to return to it with a different perspective than I had when I was sixteen and to be able to use it as a lens to focus some of the other work I’ve been up to and manipulate and subvert some of the stylistic tropes inherent in the shred guitar context.

Dialectic