Brave Julius

For the teen-aged Glenn E. Alexander, growing up in rural Texas, the guitar became an addiction quickly adopted. He took a largely self-taught approach to his craft, pursuing his idea of music with sharply focused curiosity and a whimsical persistence largely unencumbered by mainstream musical ideals. Influenced by a large swath of America's musical history, he explored a mesh of looped composition and improvisation rooted around his Martin acoustic. Homemade recordings of these explorations became the bedrock for Brave Julius, his first foray into collaborative and studio work, which fleshes out his compositions in clever and often startling ways (see The Canyon, 2010). His live show is often improvisatory-focused, effect & loop-enhanced shoegaze instrumental guitar music, with a strong compositional element that evokes many aspects of the jamband, americana, and indie-rock music scenes around the country. His shows are always an of-the-moment experience, rooted in years of performing and crafting music for the soundtrack of your life, wherever you may be.

REVIEW OF THE CANYON (2010)
This is background music that scratches and claws its way into the foreground. Just when it seems to settle down enough for your mind to let it fade, it shifts--erupting in new directions and opening up broad new soundscapes. It is a stately hallway full of doors that unexpectedly fly open to let the sun and the wind and the birds in, and just when you've acclimated yourself to those surprises, it removes the floor from beneath you. Diving and drifting in a liminal space, it refuses to fall to this or that side of the line. It is meditative but shocking, simple yet dizzyingly complex, suggestive but unpredictable. On The Canyon, Glenn Alexander's fretwork and John Woong-sae Jung's production meet as opposites but quickly find a unity that moves almost entirely in the spaces between.

-Chris Gardner