[Photo courtesy of Grant Kelly]

By Grant Kelly, Reviews Editor

Though perhaps not a household name outside of Cincinnati, Ohio’s experimental music scene, Fritz Pape is a composer, band director and guitarist who has been producing and arranging music for over a decade. With a particular interest in atmospheric drone music, Pape, in his own words, “explores the process of auditory growth and decay from whispered drones through digital corruption, utilizing a swath of guitar pedals, synthesizers and other sound-making devices.” 

One such avenue through which he does this is his long-running “Guitar Buddies” concert series, which recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary performing around the city. With its earliest compositions arranged for a small ensemble of electric guitars, this newest iteration of Guitar Buddies, hosted at the Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library’s “Social Stairs” performance space, featured 30 acoustic guitar players conducted by Pape himself, the series’ largest group of performers to date. 

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With the audience settled in, the Guitar Buddies began to pluck away at a brand new piece that could best be described as somewhere between classical minimalism and drone, with an emphasis on gradual dynamic exploration and progression. At first, the playing was almost imperceptibly quiet, with the faintest whispers of string plucks and scratches. The piece gradually rose in volume over the next several minutes, creating an interesting homogenizing effect in which the discrete strums from the ensemble morphed into a single rounded tone that bore into the minds of the audience with each pulse.

The group now playing at a pronounced volume, Pape began to take a more active role as director. Facing the ensemble, he sporadically swung the head of his guitar up and down to prompt a surge in volume, as if his guitar were a mallet and the 30 guitarists an enormous drum. Between the fullness in sound generated by the band and the interactive element of Pape’s conducting, the piece took on a lively, almost organic quality that I found myself being lulled into a trancelike state by. 

The performance continued on, droning on the same chords for around half an hour, with the players fluctuating in intensity like a rising tide. With the audience adequately hypnotized, the Guitar Buddies entered a decrescendo, receding as subtly as they came in…

Then, an alarm. The library’s emergency alert system began to blare throughout the building, with a robotic voice commanding visitors to evacuate. The performers and audience members shared equally baffled looks with one another for a moment, and awkward laughs dotted the silence between alarm whines as I followed the crowd out the concert space and into the courtyard.   

While the ending to the show was comically abrupt and unexpected, I still thoroughly enjoyed what the group was able to showcase. I managed to catch Pape after the show and ask him a few questions about the performance, which confirmed, first, that the bulk of the piece was actually able to be performed before being interrupted; the audience had only missed out on a few minutes at most. 

Second, he told me a bit about his compositional process and the history of the Guitar Buddies project. This formation of this most recent piece, and presumably much of the previous material, was a months-long process from composition (determining the “shape of the piece,” as he put it,) to rehearsal and performance. Previously, the largest Guitar Buddies ensemble was composed of 24 members playing electric guitars, who performed at the Urban Artifact brewery in Cincinnati back in 2017. 

Though the increase in scale has almost certainly increased the logistical complexity of the series, Pape floated the idea of growing the ensemble even further, past its current set of 30 musicians. He also informed me that today’s show, along with several other Guitar Buddies performances over the years, have been professionally recorded and may be released officially one day. 

Overall, I found the concert to be a rather immersive experience and anyone intrigued should keep an eye out for future performances from Fritz Pape and the group (as well as any future releases of their live recordings).