Cargo Records

Music for the Bluegrass States

Native Kentuckian R. Keenan Lawler speaks a private, fundamental language via his trademark metal-bodied resonator guitar.

With an intensely focused technique, he sets bluegrass- and blues-inflected tonalities against dense masses of harmonic overtones and sustained textures. It is a mesmerizing sound, one that conjures the effect of various global trance-musics and has beguiled a series of collaborators including Pelt, Matmos, Charalambides and My Morning Jacket. Inhabiting the mysterious string-space between Tony Conrad and John Fahey, Lawler's is a wholly original idiom of music that brims with near-religious exhaltation and spectral, gothic dread - a daring plunge through the darkened brambles of a particularly raw Americana. "The notes ring like alien crystal, cascade like a rain of mirrors, erupt like a volcano woven of wire . . . it's bluegrass for futurists . . . and the guitar is just a marvel, a gorgeous, silvery vision." -�NOUGAT MAGAZINE. "Hugely visual music, bringing space and imagery to the record which previously only half-existed . . . Gorgeous." -�BOOMKAT. "Keenan Lawler's scattered resonator guitar finds a secret vista firmly tucked away from all things real and human." -�THE BROKEN FACE.