Make Something Something Again
Since 1999 we've provided a home for oddball guitarists who play too fast, too slow, too clean, too dirty, or too something. I think most of us were galvanized by a 1992 album called Transmutation by the band Praxis, which featured the guitar stylings of Buckethead. Other touchstones were Vernon Reid of Living Colour and various other minor currents from the fringes of musical society, e.g., Henry Kaiser, Bill Frisell's work with Naked City, Mr. Bungle, microtonal music, and so on.
If you're a guitar misfit, feel free to join our merry little band.
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We started with a Yahoo group for experimental guitarists that gathered some guys from a variety of early bulletin boards, especially the old Harmony Central guitar forum.
Our first real internet home was a site called Shred Like Hell (www.shredlikehell.com)
The totem for this site was a thing called Bofatron Sofasaurus who created a topsy-turvy whirlwind of consternation due to his irreverence and postmodern approach to speedy guitar. Guitar One magazine called BoSo a "Chops Monster" but everybody else just wanted to kill him.
SLH became too crazy and Bofatron checked out -- nobody has seen him since 2002 (though, there are occasional rumors and imposters). The site was rebuilt by Infinite Ego and renamed Kronosonic. Kronos was a huge success and, with success, it became a huge pain in the ass and the whole thing was scuttled and a long chain of slumlord message boards were constructed in a game of hide and seek.Facebook reduced our last message board to a virtual ghost town so we decided to just submit to the corporate overlord and created a group there for our amusement -- and it was great to see some old faces that we had lost along the way return.
But Facebook just seems to lack something so we're using the GtrOblq domain to centralize operations to a certain extent and prepare for the future of oblique guitaring.
"GtrOblq" (the name was adopted from a Reid / Torn album) was one of our old haunts that we are now resurrecting. Along the way we have gained and lost thousands of comrades but we're still around.