Keiji Haino solo & duo with Loren Connors

In 1991, Keiji Haino sought out Loren Connors, an elusive figure in New York’s underground who, like Haino, had forged a singular guitar vernacular. Returning to the city nearly a decade after his July 1982 appearance at Studio Henry with Fred Frith and others, Haino performed that December at CBGB with John Zorn. During the same trip, he visited Connors and Suzanne Langille at their Brooklyn Heights apartment, where the pair performed a private concert for him—remarkably captured on VHS by Linsey Herman.

Connors, whose recordings then included nine volumes of Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Variations and a handful of song-based albums with Kath Bloom, was beginning to explore noise and distortion rooted in electric blues through releases on his St. Joan label. His open, blues-inflected improvisations stood in contrast to Haino’s ear-splitting walls of sound, chordal and grimy. Yet their early collaborations, documented on Live at Downtown Music Gallery (1995) and Vol. 2 (1997), reveal a striking affinity. These recordings capture the pair in a rare mode of restraint, their instrumental voices interweaving seamlessly as they trade showers of tones and leisurely anti-melodies that hang, warping, in the air. Their collaboration continued into the aughts and beyond, as Connors’s playing evolved toward a mellow, painterly style indebted to Irish airs. Over three decades of friendship, Haino and Connors have continued to find common ground in the fluency they've cultivated within a deeply personal idiom.