Mackay, Bill

Mackay, Bill

Locust Land

Drag City

***At last! It's been about five years since Bill's last solo album, Fountain Fire, one might guess that the new material was informed by his constant collaborations since (last year's BCMC release Foriegn Smokes; 2021's duo album with Nathan Bowles, Keys and 2019's duo album with Katinka Kleijn, STIR, and that's invariably so, but mostly, Bill solo is resolutely his own beast; Locust Land continues down the path of eclectically augmented guitar exploration fruitfully evidenced on Fountain Fire and Esker previously.

Mackay, Bill

Fountain Fire

Drag City

***Fountain Fire isBILL MACKAY's second solo album on Drag City. The Chicago-based guitarist’s continued sonic journeys in conversation with himself follow a travel-worn map written in his own hand. Bill has followed the trail from familiar confines to unknown places, catalyzing a style equally enamored with the traditional and the avant-garde to make his most expansive and forceful music to date. You can hear it in the opening track; as the lava and lakes of “Pre-California” simmer to boiling, Bill assembles a bridge of guitars, layering beams of rumbling acoustic, distorted electric, and arcing slide parts. By leaping boldly from fixed points, he makes synergetic discoveries in mid-air. This is the MacKay writing style in its most evolved state thus far, following serpentine paths within the patterns, lunging in and out of tonality with instinctive flair and a stoic sense of inevitability, forging a sonic mosaic that breathes and grows organically as it fills the space of a song.

Mackay, Bill

Esker

Drag City

***BILL MACKAY is a musician and a musician’s friend—a genial guitarist / composer / improviser based in Chicago who has energized the experimental folk, rock and avant scenes around town with his polyglot approach to the guitar, combining the folk of Appalachia, the blues and gospel with rock, jazz, western-country and an array of eastern modes. Over the past decade-plus, he has recorded records for Tompkins Square, Whistler, Relay, and ears&ears, both as a solo artist and with his band Darts & Arrows, while performing and collaborating with a number of other artists. Bill’s most recent album was Sunrise, in which he examined the songs of John Hulbert, whose 1972 private-press classic Opus III reflected a uniquely mid-western hybridization of finger style and city blues playing. MacKay’s interest in this tactic—essentially, a personal blending of roots elements—has evidenced itself throughout his discography. On Esker, his third solo work, Bill takes it further with an album of all-original material performed entirely in consort with himself. Playing all the parts with guitars, glass slide, bass, piano and percussion, he deepens his hybrid-genre approach with both contrast and cohesion, creating warm, melodic narratives that draw on folk, psych and experimental rock modes. (STREET DATE - 5/05/2017)