Loren Connors

The eclectic music of improvisational guitarist Loren Connors is difficult to describe neatly and concisely, but avant-garde is the best generalization. Experimental, jazz, and blues also fit, and even hints of Irish music are evident. Connors, who names abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko as his single biggest artistic influence, is incredibly prolific; he has released dozens of albums, EPs, and collaborations — many in extremely limited quantities — on countless labels under his own name and a handful of pseudonyms (including Loren Mattei and Guitar Roberts). His wife, Suzanne Langille, occasionally sings on his recordings, and the two perform as part of the group Haunted House. He also worked extensively with folk singer/songwriter Kath Bloom in the early 1980s. Connors’ obscure albums, ranging from unaccompanied acoustic guitar improvisations to deconstructed blues, were met with indifference until the early ’90s, when critics began to take notice and supporters such as Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, Gastr del Sol’s Jim O'Rourke, and Alan Licht (who has recorded with Connors, Run On, Love Child, and Blue Humans) sang his praises. Key releases include the bluesy improv of 1991′s Come Night (with Langille), the elegiac miniatures of 1999′s Airs, and the sparse, brooding Red Mars (2010).
As a child, Connors studied violin (which he credits with shaping his vibrato technique on the guitar) and trombone; he also learned rock & roll bass guitar. He was heavily influenced by his mother Mary Mazzacane’s singing as well. She often performed Johann Sebastian Bach pieces at funerals. This exposure to classical music led Connors to investigate the music of Giacomo Puccini and Frederic Chopin. Blues, particularly the works of Robert Pete Williams and Muddy Waters, also appealed to him. He studied art at Southern Connecticut University and the University of Cincinnati in the early ’70s, but he decided his music was more original than his painting. By 1976, he’d moved back to Connecticut. Two years later, Connors began issuing albums (as Loren Mazzacane) on his own Daggett label. Between 1978 and 1980, he released eight albums of solo acoustic guitar improvisations. Just 75 to 100 copies of each were pressed and sent out to radio stations, and Connors was forced to throw the unsold copies in a dumpster. (These albums were re-released in 1999 as the four-CD set Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations, Vols. 1-9, 1979-1980, thanks to writer and Father Yod Records founder Byron Coley, a longtime Connors fan.)
Between 1984 and 1989, he was largely inactive musically. He married Langille and they started a family. Connors dabbled in writing during this period and won a haiku award in Japan. He moved to New York City in 1990, and a year later he began releasing albums on labels other than his own. After Connors learned he had Parkinson’s disease in 1992, he changed the direction of his music. His early work often consisted of short acoustic guitar pieces, but once the disease was discovered, he experimented with longer electric guitar works complete with feedback and distortion. 1995′s 9th Avenue was the guitarist’s first album credited to Loren Mazzacane Connors (he would fully drop his mother’s name about a decade later). Much of Connors’ late-’90s output was released on Portland, Oregon’s Road Cone Records, with additional albums appearing on Table of the Elements, Drag City, Secretly Canadian, and Sub Rosa. The Lost Mariner, his first collaboration with bassist Darin Gray, was released by Family Vineyard in 1999.
Connors’ solo album Portrait of a Soul appeared in mid-2000. The Little Match Girl was issued the following year along with a second collaboration with Gray titled This Past Spring. Connors’ solo studio meditation on September 11, 2001, The Departing of a Dream on Family Vineyard, saw its first volume released in 2002. Two more volumes were issued by Family Vineyard in 2003 and 2004 (the latter was his last studio offering of new material for seven years). In France, with guitarist Alan Licht, was issued in 2003, as was the unique collaborative recording Arborvitae, with former Gastr del Sol guitarist David Grubbs.
Connors continued to release titles on numerous labels — live or archival material — and became ever more closely affiliated with Family Vineyard, which has taken great care with his catalog, as evidenced by its releases of As Roses Bow: Collected Airs 1992-2002 and Night Through: Singles and Collected Works 1976-2004, Two Nice Catholic Boys (with Jim O'Rourke), Curse of Midnight Mary, Into the Night Sky, and Hymn of the North Star. The label has kept fans aware of the various reissues and new live projects. The guitarist finally returned to the studio for Family Vineyard and released Red Mars, a five-piece suite, in September of 2011 — five days before the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001.
In 2012, he and Langille re-teamed on record for the time in 15 years on I Wish I Didn't Dream, an album of live improvisations based on the work of artist M P Landis. It was followed the next year by The Only Way to Go Is Straight Through by Connors and Thurston Moore. Both of these albums appeared on Northern Spy. The live recording My Brooklyn and a split LP with Vapour Theories appeared in 2014. The following year, Family Vineyard reissued of one of Connors’ most cherished albums, 1990′s Blues: The "Dark Paintings" of Mark Rothko, as well as Live in New York, which was captured the previous year during two performances held six days apart. Between April and August of 2016, Connors issued a series of singles, EPs, and collaborative recordings through the label, which included an untitled live performance with Tom Carter, Departing of a Dream, Vol. 5 and Vol. 6, and Light with Clint Heidorn.
In 2017, two radically different Connors recordings appeared from Family Vineyard: in October, the 17-plus-minute lone track Angels That Fall, an extended electric guitar and piano improvisation, and in December, Robert Crotty with Me: Loren's Collection (1979-1987). The latter recording is comprised of unheard material, unseen photos, and liner notes by Connors and Crotty’s brother, as well as a bonus disc — the first reissue of Crotty’s lone, ultra-rare Robert Crotty Blues and his “Prove It!” single — both originally released on Connors’ private St. Joan label in the late 1980s. Pretty as Ever, an LP containing material from 2000s-era releases Sails and The Little Match Girl, was also issued in 2017 by Recital.
Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations, Vol. 10, recorded live in front of a studio audience in Woodstock, New York, was issued by Blank Forms Editions in 2018. The Departing of a Dream, Vol. VII, a live performance with Daniel Carter in Brooklyn, appeared on Family Vineyard in 2019. The label released Connors’ mini-album Beautiful Dreamer in 2020. ~ Bret Adams & Thom Jurek