Not so long ago, E&MM received an LP of avant garde guitar music from fashionable jazz label ECM. The album's title was Safe Journey, and the name of the guitarist, Steve Tibbetts. The recording was inventive enough to make it one of the most memorable releases of 1984, with Tibbetts' virtuoso guitar playing being augmented with liberal helpings of ethnic percussion (courtesy of one Marc Anderson) and tapes of treated acoustic and electronic sounds.

We wanted to know more about the man behind this glorious and inspiring music, and further enquiries revealed that Safe Journey is his fourth album release (two for ECM, two on his own label), that he's played a number of concerts to considerable public and critical acclaim, and that although his is far from being a household name, Tibbetts commands a healthy and loyal cult following.

In an attempt to glean yet more information, we sent a blank tape and a set of rough questions to Tibbetts at his Minneapolis home.

This is what came back.

HISTORY

'I became involved with music, as opposed to any other particular art form, because it moved me so much emotionally when I was young. I remember my father playing his guitar in the living room, and he played an E minor chord. It was really an E minor chord that brought home to me the power and intensity of acoustic guitar playing. Later on, he taught me a song by the Kingston Trio called 'Green Back Dollar', which starts out with a somewhat menacing E minor chord. I played that song, and especially its E minor introduction, over and over again in my room, until my father wanted to forcibly remove the guitar.

'When everybody started buying electric guitars, I had to have one, of course, so I badgered my father until he bought me one. Then a friend of mine sat on it so I had to buy one for myself. Now I have a twelve-string that used to be my father's, a Martin D12S. And I have a Strat that a friend of mine gave me because he thought I'd be able to make better use of it than him, plus a kalimba that I use a lot. I'm very interested in the sound of an amplifier in the throes of agony, and what happens when you jam a Stratocaster right into the speaker. I used to do that to my Music Man but the circuit boards started to fall out and the amp exploded.

'I also have a Tascam 48-8 multitrack machine, which is the nerve centre of all the apparatus, and there's a Lexicon Super Prime Time which I'll discuss later. I use that to retrieve sounds from tape or from my voice: I can then adapt them electronically by altering rhythm or pitch, and that's how I get my musical ideas.

'As for what motivated me to write music, I couldn't stop listening to the Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows' at one stage, but aside from that there was a guitarist from Chicago called Harvey Mandell who used to come up to Madison and play at one stage. Basically he was the leader of a blues band, but some of his solos were absolutely mesmerising. The audience would be waiting for his lead solo during each song.

These days, it's sounds that inspire me to write music, particularly rhythmic sounds such as windscreen wipers, lorries, heartbeats, running.

'My first record was rather an accident. I had just finished studying Art at McAllister College and was left with nothing to do for eight months except take silly courses in Economics. I heard from a friend that the Music Department had just invested in a four-track studio: I then attached myself like a leech to that particular friend, and forced him to get me into the studio. From that day onwards I spent almost all my time there - it was only a tiny cubicle, but it was Heaven to me at the time. After about six months, I realised I was making a record. When the recording was finished, I pressed 200 copies and mutilated a few photos of American newsreaders for the cover. (See article artwork for an idea of what this looks like.) I gave one to a friend who went to San Francisco, and the next thing I heard about it was that a radio station manager there wanted me to send him some copies. There had just been too many people phoning in to ask who I was.

EVOLUTION

'The main changes that have taken place since those days are that now I work with eight tracks instead of four, and I also now work with a record company, ECM. It was extremely important to start by myself, because I could see the music gradually start to materialise on tape, and because I had to edit it, do the cover artwork, and press and distribute it myself. More musicians would benefit from doing all these things themselves instead of taking their demo tape straight to a major record company. That way, all the criticism, as well as every bit of praise, can be directed only at you. If I hadn't produced two records entirely by myself, it would have been impossible for me to work with ECM or their engineer, Manfred Eicher. I still find it enjoyable now to collaborate with other people and see how the finished product comes out 'with a midwife', as it were.

"I recorded a tape loop of some lorries passing on a motorway and used it with another of some monks singing - a bizarre combination."

'I've done some live concerts as well as albums: I think live and recorded music have their own individual set of merits, though I do find myself wondering how on Earth I'm going to be able to reproduce my music live when so much of it depends on multitrack recording. With an audience of 500, however, you effectively have a 500-track tape recorder in front of you. There are certain things you can do live that you would never dream of doing in a studio. For instance, the sound of the nails of my thumb and forefinger clicking together sounds like a bonfire if you multiply it in volume many times: we use that to start one song on stage, but we couldn't do it in the studio. Another thing we do is to make everybody choose a pitch and start singing. You find that the crowd seems to have a mind of its own and sings at one single pitch, so that from an original 500 different pitches, everything eventually dovetails into one. There is a certain group mentality in live gigs that is impossible to reproduce in the studio.

'I do need a lot of apparatus to do it successfully, however, particularly my Prime Time. A lot of my music is based upon cyclical phrases played on the guitar that are either repeated or faded out. I mic up my acoustic guitar, feed it into a volume pedal and then into a digital delay which is set up for the middle section of 'Aerial View' from my third album, Northern Song. The signal is then fed into the Lexicon, and as soon as the Lexicon is repeating it correctly, I turn the Repeat Hold on.

'The usual function electronic instruments play in my music is that of adapting acoustic sounds. At the moment I'm looking after a neighbour's cat which growls at me in an extremely musical way. Having tormented this cat a little, I entered the resulting sound into the Lexicon, and every time the cat reached a certain pitch, I'd Hold it and then complete the song.

'I have a program that increases the pitch by whole tones. I always start composing by playing a riff and then building on it. Eventually I realise that the song is taking on some sort of story and I do my best to complete it, using that to hang the rest of the track onto. Afterwards, the story either dissolves or remains in the track.

'Another technique that I intend to explore is putting myself in a certain situation and discovering what music results from that. I spent a month in the Grand Canyon 18 months ago: the only noises I heard during that month were the sounds of rock, water and animals. Some of the music inspired by that was wonderful. In fact, a lot of the songs on Safe Journey such as 'Climbing', 'Test', 'Running' and 'Vision' came out of it, so I'm now thinking of taking Marc Anderson skydiving in a few days. He doesn't know that yet, but it should be interesting to do some music about fear or skydiving.

'Going back to technology, I suppose one day I'd like to be able to step on stage without two 12-strings, an electric guitar and an acoustic six-string. It would be nice to have just one six-string controller unit that runs into something like an Emulator and will put out 12-string, six-string and electric guitar sounds at the touch of a button. I'm sure that it will happen, but then I'm also sure that it will be too expensive for me to afford right now. I tend to get bogged down with the sheer physical work of moving my equipment, so anything that cuts down that would be welcome. On the other hand, I'm sure there must be a lot of synthesiser players with aching backs who dream about setting up a harmonica band.

'I'm very interested in what computers can do with animation. I know it takes a long time to put together, but I've seen some examples of music accompanying animated images that were very exciting. I can't wait to find out what will happen to computer imaging in a few years.

"I'm interested in what computers can do with animation. I've seen some exciting examples of music accompanying animated images."

COLLABORATION

'I've worked with a number of other people, though the major collaborator has been Marc Anderson. He brings a more sexual, earthy element into our work: he pounds congas as if he's trying to put his hands through them, and I like that sort of sound. Mind you, it takes a lot of effort to transfer a sound from the instrument in the studio to somebody's speakers at home. That's why we pound twice as hard!

'The people or animals around me have a great effect on my work, like the cat I've already mentioned. And my girlfriend is another example. Not long ago she brought this nose flute into the studio and played it into the delay. She started laughing about it, so I put that laugh through the Lexicon and repeated it for about three days. It was such a manic, demonic laugh: it actually formed the basis for 'Going Somewhere' from Safe Journey.

'I don't think anybody composes music purely as a solo artist. It would be interesting to put somebody in a room at birth with a musical instrument and see what kind of music that person eventually writes.

'Generally speaking, I mic up my Marshall amplifier and run it through a mixer, a volume pedal, a delay and finally to a stereo amp. I'm able to take sounds generated by the amplifier and feed them into the delay, which is stereo. When I was writing 'Test' (also from Safe Journey), I held a high note and fed it into the delay, because once I've held the repeat, I can play over it easily. I'm able to take any acoustic instrument and alter its sound electronically, and that's basically how 'Test' came about. It was called 'Test' because air raid sirens went off during the recording, and ended up on the tape.

THE NEW ALBUM

'Climbing' is basically about the sensation of climbing for a long time and the changing scenery of the mountain around you as you ascend and eventually reach the top. I asked Marc to provide a moral to this story through playing his drums, and the way he makes the drums speak is incredible. I don't know exactly what they say, but they certainly provide a fitting close to the song. That's the sort of thing that would be really difficult to achieve on a synthesiser, I feel. 'Night Again' is a bit of fun. You hear the drone from about 300 sitars with acoustic guitars played over the top. My girlfriend bought a dog, and when she went out, she put the dog in the bathroom (it wasn't house-trained), and when I came home the dog was making absolutely pathetic noises. However, as they were also quite musical, I taped them and made a tape loop of them. That resulted in a sound which, although quite strange, was still a bit too close to the original for my liking: it was too dog-like, for want of a better expression, so I put it on to all eight tracks of my tape recorder, starting the tape at a different place on each of the tracks, which produced an absolutely unearthly sound.

'Running' took less than a day to record. Marc and I went out to a place where there were four buildings facing each other around a sort of courtyard. Marc played various percussion instruments there for the whole day, and he also brought his son Justin with him, who ran in front of my microphones on one occasion. At the time this incident passed unnoticed, but when I played back, what greeted me was a most plaintive sound of this little boy running across the grass from left to right in the stereo picture towards his father. I made a loop of this which turned out to be rather sad, because all you heard was this boy running and running without ever getting to his father. Marc was playing some woodblocks at the same time, and we used their rhythm, combined with that of the running, to form the basis of the track we wrote there and then.

'As I've said, my girlfriend's laugh formed the basis of 'Going Somewhere', but another sound I used on that track was a recording of lorries as they pass on a motorway. I've always found it terrifying when a juggernaut comes up behind you on the road and overtakes at 70 miles per hour, causing your car to be almost sucked in underneath the wheels. I found that trucks make an almost musical noise, and this I added to a tape loop of some monks singing. That's obviously a bizarre combination, and actually I think it would be nice to have a versatile overdub program written into a computer to perform just such combinations of sound samples. Sometimes I like to take a simple sound, like that of myself reading aloud or the sound of a wine glass when you rub a wet finger around the rim, and record it onto eight tracks of a tape recorder. What happens then is that I mix it down to two tracks before mixing it back up eight times to give a total of 64, and then repeat the process until I have about 250,000 tracks of the same sound over and over again. The result is that the sounds tend to reinforce or cancel themselves in very interesting patterns. It's as though you were looking at a newspaper photograph from very close to. All you can see are dots, but when you stand back, the picture resolves itself, just as when you hear only one track of speech. If I had a computer instrument and a suitable program, it would be a lot easier to go through the process I've just outlined, and probably more accurate, too.'

So who knows? Perhaps in a couple of years' time, Steve Tibbetts will be adding a music computer or two to bis instrumental armoury. It would certainly be no surprise to find him dabbling on the brink of musical technology in much the same way as he's already taken the conventions of the musical avant garde and thrown them in the creative waste bin.

Not everybody will be appreciative of the precious and introspective view he has of his work, but there's no doubting his ability to create music of invention, vitality, and above all humanity, which is something few avant garde composers seem capable of at the time of writing.

If those are the sort of qualities that help you decide whether or not a particular style of music is appealing, you owe it to yourself to check Steve Tibbetts out.