On Fair, a live recording from May 2023, Sam King delves further into the distinct idiom of Untight, which combines just-intonated electric guitar with delay and loop effects to create a shimmering, immersive sonic experience. This cathartic half-hour of improvisation renders images of grief, dread, bliss, and release.

“I recognize that communicating through music requires finding common ground with the listener, and at the same time, I feel an instinct to challenge or destabilize it,” Sam King says, about his creative process. “Playing guitar this way makes many clichés unavailable, or at least impractical.”

Let me start by saying I will not be delivering an explanation of the mechanics behind just intonation here, but this is an enormous part of King’s sound (he plays a custom-built, single-pickup electric guitar redesigned to create adjusted intervals) and the way he approaches music, the way he hears his own sound and thus reacts to it in real time, drawing new decisions from moment-to-moment haptic feedback. (( The brilliant Kyle Gann gives a detailed and articulate overview of just intonation here, so if this is a foreign concept to you, please take a moment to explore that. ))

In King’s quote above, there’s an undertone of unfamiliarity, which is to say he’s constantly battling the instinct to default to what the ear thinks it’s going to hear. He’s stretching the muscles of creativity one way when they want to flex the other way. That’s the thing with new mathematical intervals: despite hundreds of hours of practicing and playing his instrument in a new intervalic tuning system, the resulting wave dynamics are still comparatively foreign to modern ears, his included. No music today outside the avant-garde makes use of just intonation, it just doesn’t sound like anything else, and yet, it sounds totally organic when you’re IN IT.

And that’s kind of the point sometimes. We hear our names being called by the phantom voice of overtones in the wind, we hear spirits talking through old radio broadcast recordings, ghosts in the machine, we feel calm or stress or hunger or focused based on some fundamental frequencies that resonate with particular organs and meridians.

Sound is an embodied experience, we feel much more than we consciously hear, and just intonation enhances the clustering activity of sound waves in air to create more sites for interaction with sound physically and cognitively. But this isn’t just a record exemplifying a celestial tuning, it’s a performance and a work of art in its own right.

So here’s a hot take hypothetical for you: if King tuned his guitar with equal temperament, and played exactly this piece, exactly as is, in exactly the same space, it would be a gorgeous record that way, as it is a gorgeous record this way, which says everything you need to know about the musicality here, the incredible restraint, the sonic textures he’s able to conjure up unrelated to harmonic overtones and intervalic resonance, and the flow of this piece as a landscape.

I don’t mean to say the tuning is superfluous or extraneous here, in fact the opposite. He doesn’t need to rely on the idiosyncrasies of cloud overtones in order to achieve a brilliant work, which deepens the listening experience as an exploration of those wave mechanics alongside his piece’s performative characteristics.

King has a feel that is closely linked to his instrument’s limitations, but as well a keen sense of construction within the time frame of a half-hour. To improvise is to be at play with time, and how we decide to spend it. To rearchitect instants to communicate and connect with future states, or bridge elements from past states. Indeed, this single long-form piece pulls and twists time like taffy and molds it like silly puddy.

I mean, let’s be real. There are guitarry moments here that sound like someone simply forgot to retune a string, but quite a lot of the cloud sonics could’ve been plucked straight from an afternoon lying down at La Monte Young’s Dream House. Every fundamental is fighting for its life against a tide of Aeolian overtones that come washing over it as soon as it is plucked.

I love that King doesn’t overly resort to long-sustained tones, either, as string players in this tuning tend to gravitate towards that model of showcasing the interplay of the overtones, air waves crashing against each other. It is exciting to examine that in real time, and sometimes in slow-motion (as with drones), incredible rainbows of sound color manifesting in our full view. But King’s default to Orcutt-style, or post-Bailey guitar improvisation undercuts that process of visibility to uncover a more fragmented spectacle. Like fireworks of air molecules blistering a frittata on broil, or flying through turbulent air inside the brass hull of a sousaphone.

We sometimes forget that the guitar is a piece of wood with six (or so) vibrating strings hovering just above it. It’s records like these that remind us of exactly that.

Besides Owen Gardner’s just intonation tuned guitar work in Horse Lords and solo, which is a semi-obvious reference to anyone who’s naturally inclined to seek out this kind of thing, a second curious reference here that comes to mind for me is Oren Ambarchi’s 2007 In The Pendulum’s Embrace.

There, as well as here, I’m listening for the tone clouds. Ambarchi’s is more a meditation of pace, and space — whereas King’s performance is a clustered, choreographic work of art in and of itself — but in both cases we’re forced to listen to “resonance matter,” warts and all. It’s a mud. It’s a sourdough mother. It’s a cave of molten volcanic lava gurgling to life so deep down that our flashlights can’t even shine all the way to the bottom.

We must grapple with this sound to get to the music of it, and that’s King’s instinctual challenge to himself as well as us, to destabilize an environment of familiarity. In doing so, he finds beauty, purpose, passion, new reflections of and reactions to sound, and new spaces for interaction within it.

Please check out Untight’s music at the link below.

Listen and purchase here, please.