Janet Feder

Janet Feder fell in love with everything about the guitar when she was a little bigger than a ukulele. Born in Boulder, Colorado and raised in Denver, her childhood was immersed in classical and folk music. As a teenager, she devoured rock n’ roll and fingerstyle playing, then spent more than a decade devoted to classical guitar study and performance. In this discipline, she was consumed by the music of J.S. Bach, the guitar icons of Spain and South America, and 20th century composers around the globe. Janet attended Denver Public Schools, the high school of the Royal Music Conservatory of Brussels, and earned a bachelor’s degree in Musicology from the University of Massachusetts. A serendipitous conversation with a colleague in 1995 inspired what has become Feder’s iconoclastic offering: composition for prepared guitar. Her expansive sonic palette is created by applying various small, often metal objects to discrete strings of her guitars. Janet’s compositions and performances on both acoustic and electric guitar comprise five solo albums and have been featured on numerous internationally acclaimed compilations and film scores. Janet’s two most recent solo albums, T H I S C L O S E (2015) and Songs With Words (2012) were recorded at Immersive Studios in Boulder, Colorado in DSD Pure on Gus Skinas' 32 channel Sonoma System. Janet does not use digital effects and none are used in these recordings; all sounds are analogue and played live. A reviewer noted that Songs With Words "explores the outer reaches of sonic possibility yet never loses the thread of melody and beauty" [Paul Epstein, Twist & Shout]…while T H I S C L O S E has been described as "Feder's most fully realized album...Unique and highly moving music." [Eval Hareuveni, All About Jazz]. Janet said “T H I S C L O S E feels like an arrival at the culmination of, well, everything that got me here. Previous albums felt like they happened in my head; T H I S C L O S E feels like it emerged from somewhere between my head and my heart. I played what I wanted to hear ... It was all part of accepting the invitation, this collaboration, this gift, with Mike (Yach, engineer) and Joe (Shepard, producer).” Janet invites her listeners to explore the private, intimate landscapes she creates with her baritone guitars. She adds to her palette everyday objects as instruments that are not typically associated with music - or even sound - including toothpicks and rubber balls, bicycle inner tubes and steel ball bearings, split rings, rocks, ceramic plates and walls, egg-slicers, horsehair… and her bare hands. What defines her music, both live and recorded, is how she constructs the shapes, textures and movements of sounds to create her unique sonic universe. Feder has performed or collaborated with: Fred Frith, Nels Cline, Henry Kaiser, Bill Frisell, Elliott Sharp, Mike Keneally, Bryan Beller, Amy Denio, Mike Johnson/Thinking Plague, Susie Asado, Nikmat Hatraktor, Paolo Angeli, Wu Fei, Tatsuya Nakatani, Erin McKeown, Jane Rigler, Shoko Nagai, Satoshi Takeishi, James Sidlo, Pauline Oliveros and poet Anne Waldman. She is also half of Denver-based duo cowhause with Colin Bricker (laptop + live electronics). Janet lectures at the University of Colorado teaching The History of Rock n’ Roll; co-curates MediaLive, (an annual festival in Boulder, Colorado); and is an artistic associate with Square Product Theatre. Discography Janet Feder’s solo projects include: • T H I S C L O S E (2015) SACD + vinyl • Songs With Words (2012) SACD + vinyl • Ironic Universe CD + DVD featuring Fred Frith (AdHoc Records/USA 2006) • Speak Puppet (Recommended Records/UK 2001) • i c y i m i (Brainbox Records/USA1995) Feder also appears on: • Jane Rigler's Rarefactions with Shoko Nagai and Satoshi Takeishi (Neuma/USA 2015) • Honey Barbara's Wave Grass (Gifted Amateur Recordings/USA 2014) • The $100 Guitar Project (Bridge Records/USA 2012) • I Never Meta Guitar produced by Elliott Sharp (Clean Feed Records/Portugal 2010) • 156 Strings produced by Henry Kaiser (Cuneiform Records/USA 2002) • Multiple Compilations (Zerx Records/USA 1999-07) Janet was a contributor to Paul Riola's Bottesini Project, featured alongside Nels Cline, Keenan Wayne, CacheFlowe, Glenn Taylor, and Mark Harris on the 2009 album Naima's Grass Pajamas. In conjunction with Paul Fowler, Feder composed the film score Leavings (2014), plus the score and sound design for the Square Product Theatre adaptation of Selah Satterstrom's novel SLAB. Her other collaborative film score credits include Doc Of The Dead (EPIX 2014) and Eat The Future (2015). "T H I S C L O S E" out now!