Back when, when I was holed up in Terre Haute, Indiana for a month or so, I was rooming with a fellow whilst attending some classes on graphic design and such. This was about 1990 and he was very much into three musicians I had never heard of: Joe Satirani, Yngwie Malmsteen, and the band, Jane’s Addiction. One righteous mixtape and a year later, I was dreaming of what Jane says, gypsy-klezmer-rock mashups, and macking it with that girl I met in Model U.N. It was also in 1991 that teenage Brian Carrol (later to be known as Buckethead) moved into the basement of Guitar Player Magazine’s editor, Jas Obrecht, and thus began the artist’s passage from strength to greater strength: huzzah! Carrol was brought to the attention of avant-improvisers, collaborators and producers Bill Laswell and John Zorn (which is how I heard of him). Just as I was beginning to learn about new ambient through the likes of Laswell’s Axiom releases, astralwerks, Silent/Flask, and the FAX label, word of Buckethead was spreading across the ambient/noise genre through the metal community. Appearing as subliminal blips on Space Ghost Coast to Coast also helped, but I wasn’t entirely aware of Buckethead until my computer was chronically ill recently and I was listening to KLSU 91.1 Baton Rouge full time in stead of my inaccessible musics. It was well worth the break for I heard Buckethead’s rawk ballad, “Nottingham Lace” released on his 2005 album Enter the Chicken.

This is about the most heavy metal guitar I’ve heard in a long time that I’ve been willing to put up with. Something about this track is just putting me under a spell. Part of it is that Buckethead changes focus and his direction so often. I don’t know why I like it so much. I lost interest in Joe Satriani pretty quickly, but maybe this means I should revisit him. What’s happening to my ears?! Buckethead has attested that Satriani and Malmsteen were huge influences on him, so perhaps my ears have found a hook on patterns I hadn’t heard in the last half of my waking life. Click on the link above (or on the picture below) to hear “Nottingham Lace”… I think, if you can get past the bluesey electirc guitar riffs (?) at the beginning, you’ll hear what I’m talking about, and if you do, let me know what you think.

I’d also appreciate any further Buckethead related suggestions. Danke shöen!

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

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“Nottingham Lace” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.