The idea of an over-the-top electric guitar rock solo has always repulsed me. For me, this type of music immediately conjures up images of all of the stereotypical vestiges of what rock music was and is. Despite how much I hate this style of playing, as a guitarist, I can’t escape it and love when the concept gets hijacked and turned into something truly grotesque. I wanted to create something that tapped into the same musical language that is so often associated with the idea of the “guitar-god” while completely reversing the concept. With this goal in mind, I set out to write The Motherfucker Suite, a five-movement work centered on the idea of masculine failure through the lens of the electric guitar solo.

While electric guitar solos inspired the suite, I didn’t want to directly reference any of the music that audiences might typically associate with a standard guitar solo. Instead, I composed the work from fragments of mistakes, pick slips, moments when I failed to hit the right note, and other errors that don’t typically make it onto a polished album. From these failures, I built the solos that drive the album. All of the guitars on the album are prepared, digitally manipulated, or adjusted somewhat to detune or devoice them, and are played with dulcimer hammers, combs, metal pipes, and wires in addition to typical picks and finger-tapping techniques. Tracks 1 and 5 also feature audio that I coded and sourced from the computer language SuperCollider.

The name of the album stems from the medieval Geisslerlieder, or Flagellant songs. These were the songs of wandering bands of flagellants who crossed Europe during two periods of mass hysteria surrounding outbreaks of the Black Death. The music was simple, sung in the vernacular, often call-and-response, closely related to folk song and accompanied the act of self-flagellation. Initially, the movement was confined to nobles and upper-class individuals, but eventually individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds joined. The texts were imploring, penitential, and apocalyptic.

The suite is divided into five movements loosely inspired by the surviving Geisslerlierder texts, Baroque instrumental and dance forms, and additionally draws influence from bands and composers including Big Black, Shellac, Fred Frith, Glenn Branca, J.S. Bach, Georg Philipp Telemann, and François Couperin. The album is a direct response to the fetishization of the male guitar virtuoso, the masturbatory nature of the electric guitar solo, and how the ideal masculine image based on strength and resilience is incredibly fragile. This same fragility drives the downward-spiral narrative of the album – a flailing and helpless dance rooted in tight, restrictive form that slowly breaks apart over the course of five tracks.

Erich Barganier (he/him) is a composer & multi-instrumentalist who writes music that explores experimental technology, the edge of noise, improvisation, generative processes, and new forms of notation. Recent collaborators include Mark Stewart, Noise Catalogue, BlackBox Ensemble, House on Fire & Instruments of Happiness.