I Just Read About That…

[ATTENDED: July 10, 2024] Emily Robb

Emily Robb is a guitarist from Philadelphia.  I didn’t know much about her, but the last time she opened a show (which I didn’t attend) I wrote:

Emily Robb plays an electric guitar (and is referred to as a guitar abuser).  She has a solo album out that is an incredible amount of fuzzy guitar noise.

No vocals, no artifice, barely even a drum. It’s a totally fried, mutant offering that’ll entice the twisted seekers– a sustained, distilled meditation on the unabashed revved up freedom of rock.

She came up on stage with her guitar and pedals and amp and… played.   For forty plus minutes.

She played bluesy riffs.  She looped herself.  She played solos over those riffs.  She made noise.  She experimented with melodies and feedback.

Sometimes it was interesting.  Sometimes it was tedious.

She played a whole section in which sliding her pick up the strings was a major part of the sound.

And she eventually grabbed a violin bow and played the guitar with it (which I feel didn’t change the sound appreciably).

The whole show felt vaguely self-indulgent and what I took away from it more than anything was that it was cool to see a woman on stage being so self-indulgent.  Usually this kind of “let me improvise things that I like to do” showcase is done by a dude with a guitar.  But here was this woman whom I’d never heard of, standing in front of a room of people just experimenting with sounds.  And that was pretty cool.

Here’s a clip of her set