Artist profiles

Kelly Joe Phelps

Kelly Joe Phelps has always been an explorer of sonic possibilities.  Driven by a head full of ideas and influence and hands ever eager to create he has produced records that have always been difficult to classify or pigeon hole.  Whether it be the blistering slide guitar works of his early career or 2007’s gem Tunesmith Retrofit Phelps has looked to challenge the confinements of the genre.  

On Western Bell, his eighth studio album and debut for Canada’s Black Hen label, he takes his music to a new level of expression.  Eleven solo guitar pieces recorded live in the studio on 6-string, 12 string, and a lap slide, the vast majority of the numbers are improvised on the spot and Phelps seems to deconstruct the very instrument that’s carried him around the world. Playing mostly in odd tunings, only the most basic elements of a “guitar piece” remain – vibrato, the occasional alternating thumb and the cack of a bar on a steel string.