EXTRAVISION by Guy Blakeslee
Baltimore-born musician Guy Blakeslee found himself transformed after being struck by a car on the first day of the pandemic. This life-altering event led him to create EXTRAVISION, a meditative collection of healing music to help listeners experience a sense of timeless peace. Soundscapes and gentle healing rhythms provide an ideal backdrop for relaxation and renewal during this month’s Community Acupuncture sessions.
EXTRAVISION is a deeply therapeutic analog offering from experimental guitarist Guy Blakeslee. Healing music, New Age tape music, ambient soundscape, Satie on acid, music for psychedelic therapy, an extraterrestrial film score … call it what you will; Blakeslee considers it “channeled material” sent through him from other, parallel dimensions.
“His allegiance isn’t to genre but to the pursuit of artistic liberation through psychedelia” – The New Yorker
After a limited self-release in 2022, EXTRAVISION, the deeply therapeutic musico-psychonautic offering from experimental guitarist Guy Blakeslee has received the Leaving Records “all genre” re-release treatment, with the understanding that more listeners should hear this vulnerable and graceful document. The record is, in a word, a balm. Like a window flung open on a sweltering day, EXTRAVISION occasions the sudden awareness of space, of calm, of context, of possibility. The record also catalogs a musician’s search for meaning and healing in the wake of catastrophe.
Since its initial run, Blakeslee has been bracingly open about Extravision’s genesis. On March 13th, 2020, while walking across the street, Blakeslee was struck by a car. Upon regaining consciousness the following day, the hospitalized Blakeslee found both the outer world and his inner world suddenly transformed. As lockdowns took effect, it was immediately clear that the brain injuries Blakeslee sustained had not only affected his vision but altered his very consciousness and would inevitably affect his music-making.
From Los Angeles, to Virginia, to Baltimore, he pursued physical and spiritual recovery with music as his primary medicine. Sitting for hours at the piano, the man for whom guitar had always been the primary instrument now intuited the riddles and patterns laid out neatly before him in black and white.
Armed with a beginner’s mind and a cassette 4-track, Blakeslee began to experiment with wordless, impressionistic songcraft. EXTRAVISION is the transcendent result, an hour-plus compendium of humble and fiery dalliances with the musical and psychical unknown—a record from a lifelong musician rediscovering the joys and vexations of learning.
Throughout EXTRAVISION, the guitar exists as both specter and reference. A majority of the album’s tracks notably do not feature any discernible guitar—the songs function as emotive, drone-based exercises in texture and duration. And yet, one never doubts the extent to which Blakeslee’s practice has been (and continues to be) informed by a uniquely American folk guitar idiom. We are, with Blakeslee as our guide, gladly charting the vast and newest horizons of so-called “American Primitive” music, now often referred to as “Cosmic American.”
And when Blakeslee’s interdimensional guitar does eventually emerge — see the album’s fittingly final title track, “Extravision”— the sweetness, not untinged by loss, is palpable. Blakeslee has stated that his goal with EXTRAVISION is to induce in the listener a trance-like state, to inaugurate the conditions under which time might function “differently.” To be sure, the drones and gentle recurrent phrases that comprise much of the album are a welcome antidote to the now commonly felt acceleration of time. But it is the experience that Blakeslee is transmitting with and through and beyond these musical gestures—the experience of non-linear time, of total time-loss, of starting again, of retracing one’s steps and rerouting one’s journey— that challenges and rewards us.
