Keith Rowe, guitar, electronics. Recorded at home from mid-2013 to mid-2016. 4 solo CDs, 246 minutes, no content overlap with the earlier The Room (ErstSolo 001) this is Keith’s solo masterwork.
“One of the first things that hits you is the immense depth of much of the work; there always seems to be at least four or five layers of sound occurring, enough that on each subsequent listen (I’ve been through its four-plus hours five times so far), you pick up not only sounds you’ve not heard/noticed before but, more rewardingly, new relationships between them, both simultaneous ones and ones spanning the course of the piece. For a while, Rowe has been interested in revisiting sound areas he’s investigated over the years, seeing if there might be aspects he’d previously missed or investigating new ways of deploying them and at several moments here, listeners familiar with his history may well recognize some signature sounds. There are plenty of new, even startling ones as well, such as the artificial sounding bird call that’s looped for an almost unconscionable length at one point. More tellingly, the habit he first (as far as I know) used in his solo performance in Tokyo in 2008, that of the intentional inclusion of extracts from Western classical music, is a thread that winds through the entirety of ‘The Room Extended’. In at least one sense, it’s simply an honest evocation of his room, the main room of his home in Vallet, in which any visitor will hear over his stereo, not the latest release from the contemporary improvising world, but rather Wagner, Haydn, Brahms, Purcell, Mondonville and others. This is, in a circumscribed sense, his room.” Brian Olewnick, Just Outside