Guitarist Chris Forsyth’s hypnotic instrumentals assimilate art-rock textures with vernacular American influences culled from a lauded career as a composer, improviser, and inveterate collaborator. Long active in the international improv/experimental underground, he’s released a series of acclaimed records as a solo artist that demonstrate a resolute engagement in making corporeal/cerebral music that transcends such subterranean realms, reaching instead for a bleeding-edge physicality and lyricism that he deems “cosmic Americana.” The fascinating tension manifest in Forsyth’s playing between often long-form, rarefied abstraction and percolating rhythms and rock/roots structures animates notable recent works such as his 2011 LP Paranoid Cat on Family Vineyard and Early Astral, a 2012 duo LP with Koen Holtkamp (Mountains) on Blackest Rainbow.

His 2012 Kenzo Deluxe LP/CD on Northern Spy, which features “The First Ten Minutes of Cocksucker Blues,” a stunning conceptual soundtrack piece for Robert Frank’s banned Rolling Stones documentary film, has been described as “resonant [and] incisive… a cosmic abstraction of the American guitar tradition, reducing blues, rock, folk and improvisation into their spare, hypnotic base elements.” Aptly, Forsyth credits a Keith Richards interview in a 1988 issue of Guitar World with introducing his teenage self to the banjo-derived open G tuning, which Forsyth now employs almost exclusively. The Wire has praised him as “an erudite and farsighted guitar stylist, mapping a path that’s hip and scholarly in equal measure.” Uncut calls him “an emergent master.”