“Altered tunings obliterated my knowledge of the fretboard. I just put my hands on the guitar, started playing, and found I was using only my ear. It was liberating”: Bentley Anderson is imagining a strange new future for guitar music

Alone in his dorm room, transfixed by the bloom and decay of a single note, Bentley Anderson discovered his obsession and his voice on the guitar.

“I spent years trying to learn how to play proper guitar, and I was totally mediocre,” Anderson says. “I could never learn how to shred, even though I really tried.”

Anderson weaponized that sound and resonance from his dorm into a glorious noise. Carved from saw blades, chisels, metal rods, and a Fender Jazzmaster, Valence – his latest collection of hellish soundscapes – dares the listener to turn away, offering catharsis only to those who return. Still, to describe Bentley Anderson’s music as “just noise” would be reductive at best.

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“If you’re someone who’s never heard anything outside of, you know, Barry Manilow, you’re gonna be like, ‘What the fuck is this?!’” Anderson says. “It’s not a literal racket. You can glean some kind of narrative from it.”

“You can make all kinds of sounds, but they’re not all necessarily good. You have to dig deep for compelling sounds,” he says. “The saw blade just has this perfect kind of metal weight and size. I hold it over the pickups and hit it with my fingers.”

“I found it on the ground,” he says with a laugh. “I find all kinds of shit here in New York. I call them my ‘implements.’ It’s a little bit like a prepared-instrument situation.”

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Anderson views playing guitar as an opportunity for deconstruction. Inevitably then, when he began interning at Sonic Youth’s studio in 2005, the band’s use of alternate tunings became another tool for Anderson to employ as he found his voice on his instrument.

“The guitar on Valence is, low to high, F#, F#, D, G, A, C#,” he says. “Altered tunings obliterated my knowledge of the fretboard to where I just put my hands on the guitar, started playing, and found I was using only my ear. It was liberating.”

Has traditional guitar-based music run its course, then?

“I think someone will always be writing an amazing song in a standard tuning,” he says. “I don’t think that’ll ever stop, and I don’t think people will ever get bored with that. It’s not that I’m bored with that either, but I’m obsessed with sounds, resonance, and weird. You have to find your strengths.”

• Valence is out now.
• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.