Michael Brook

Relatively unknown guitar guru Michael Brook is as much of a technical innovator as a technique-al innovator. Not content with traditional mastery over an instrument that takes a lifetime to master as it is, he seems more interested in pushing the envelope – in stretching the guitar itself into new sonic possibilities. Probably his most significant contribution to electric guitar-craft is the Infinite Guitar. Just as for the piano, the harp, and other essentially percussive instruments, one of the major shortcomings of the guitar is that once you play a note, it begins to fade away and radiate. You can stop a note short, but there’s no way to sustain it, or even increase the volume of a note already played, as you can do on bowed string, brass, and woodwind instruments.

(I once heard, on the excellent radio program This American Life, an old accordion player lamenting the fact that accordions had fallen from favor. Once the electric guitar started becoming popular, it totally eclipsed the accordion as the instrument of choice for (primarily) boys who wished to explore the world of music on a reasonably portable instrument. Plus, the electric guitar (and especially the reaction to it that many parents had) instantly made the accordion dated and square and on the wrong side of the generation gap. So, nobody took the accordion seriously anymore and it brought great sadness to this old player. He hated the guitar for not only what it had done to his beloved instrument but also for what he felt was its real shortcoming: “What kind of instrument takes two hands to make just one note?”).

With the advent of effects pedals and the careful harnessing of feedback, it did become possible to sustain a note or even increase its volume after the string had been plucked, but feedback is fickle and doesn’t always do what you want it to. Along came Michael Brook and his Infinite Guitar. How it works is entirely beyond me, but the effect is to be able to play a guitar note and have it (and not just its feedback loop) sustain indefinitely. Like most guitar technicians, Brook needed a messenger. His own music, while surprisingly varied and absolutely beautiful, is a little too esoteric to be embraced by the public at large.

He found his messenger in the biggest band to ever come out of Ireland, U2. After a series of moderately popular albums, U2’s guitarist, The Edge, incorporated Brook’s Infinite Guitar into their sound for the widely acclaimed and publicly popular album The Unforgettable Fire and the gigantic Joshua Tree album, which turned them into one of the biggest bands in the world. Of course, some of the credit can be placed on producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois’ shoulders (a production style that works beautifully with that particular guitar sound). And I suppose the band itself had something to do with it, but for many people, the sound of U2 – the wind that lead singer Bono Vox’s voice soars on – is the vast, airy, heroic sound of the Infinite Guitar.

This track is taken from Cobalt Blue – the album that, in its own way, broke Michael Brook to a larger audience. The album is filled with beautiful and varied explorations of the possibilities of his guitar and the different techniques required to play it. I had the opportunity once to hear him in concert, as the opening act for David Sylvian and Robert Fripp. He performed alone and would build tracks to remarkable complexity by starting sounds, looping them, changing the timbre of his guitar, starting and looping other bits and textures and gradually adding to the sonic tapestry. It was delicate and refined work, and it never became chaotic or strident or overly dissonant – a great tribute to his disciplined less-is-more technique, but quite foreign to most people’s idea of guitar heroics. At one point, after building a particularly lush soundscape out of his guitar, somebody yelled out from the audience, “how much of that are you actually playing?” Michael Brook looked out into the audience, smiled serenely, and said, “All of it, man. All of it.”