abacaxi @ musicworks (ca)
No festival could be more appropriate for the North American debut of French guitarist Julien Desprez, here with his trio Abacaxi. Desprez plays guitar and pedals with the unimaginable precision of a robot from the future, hand jumping from headstock to bridge, picking strings and punching the body and fingerboard, all of it in lock-time with a literal dance on a pedal board that not only mutates and distinguishes every nanosecond of sound but controls a light show from black-out to incendiary flare, all of this resulting in a music that simultaneously invokes Hendrix, Webern, and video games. He’s the most dramatic figure to emerge in improvised music in decades.