Innova 
Shawn Persinger is Prester John : The art of modern primitive guitar (US,2004)****°
This is a splendid guitar-instrumental only release of a former member from the avant-rock-in opposition styled group Boud Deun. When I look at Swawn’ Persinger’s influences I realize his guitar style is in fact a personal blend from qualities adapted from some essence noticeable in each of these names, so through the influence I can also describe the guitar style and the vision behind it. First of all it was John Fahey who used the term of American “primitive guitar style” to make the guitar as a raw-power essential instrument for creating new compositions, founded in folk, jazz, blues, old style traditions. From Fahey’s approach it was Kottke with his first album who highlighted a new remarkable fast fingerpicking melodic style. Persinger wants to add even more to this foundation. '“Modern" primitive guitar' adds new focuses to it inspired on what was developed on acoustic guitar over the last twenty years, combined with ideas which have connections from modern art, and which have their direct influence from new classical music. In general the style is fast melodic fingerpicking with half of the tracks melodically arranged (with "normal harmonies"), while other tracks have their influence from 'newer music' with "stranger" harmonies, typical for new classical music and for the avant-garde which has a certain basis from classical music, new music or eventually blues and jazz and beyond.
Shawn widens the scope of “Primitive” because additionally any ‘experiment’, which uses the guitar as a changeable instrument in shape, form, preparedness and use, is interesting enough for him too. A direct influence in guitar style comes from Janet Fader who has her own visions to it compositions, prepared guitar etc.. The “modern approach” here is partly derived from all kinds of structured avant-garde ideas. The early new compositional structured “cut and paste” ideas of Don Van Vliet, who's basic interests were in blues and perhaps jazz, is one of his other influences. Strawinski, another mentioned influence, is also someone who rearranged normal compositions into new structures, and classical compositions. Shawn also quotes influences from modern art. Dubuffet was an “art brut” & outsider art-lover, while he himself made new rearranged collage structures of broken apart pieces, while Picasso (along with Braque, both painting guitars in their early cubbistic period) showed new visual persectives -dirived from filmic/photographic ideas- making new compositions based upon showing forms from different angles, resulting in a structured composition based upon the rearranged defragmentations into a compositional structure with its own new order. Other modern art influences are W.H.Johnson, and Miro & Klee who both made mobile kind of poetic paintings, with Miro using obvious objects in new context, and Karel Appel, an important Cobra member, from an artform who has a direct expressiveness with inspiration, -like Dubuffet- from outsider art or from child-like directness in painting. In avant-garde music it is John Zorn who is also mentioned as one of his influences, a musician who deliberatly adds almost diagonal, angular ideas to the structures. What these mentioned artists and influences have in common is that they have an intellectual vision and their own technique in reshaping forms by breaking them apart and then putting them together again.
But Shawn Persinger is not just avant-garde. The Fred Frith influence might stand for the aspects of Fred’s looking for new structures. Piazolla, in the same way as Shawn, also takes the basic instrument, with a leading energy, to the heights a wider classical music composition. Other influences, -perhaps for the "mood" these guitarists bring into structured compositions- are Marc Ribot, Eugene Chadbourne, Michael Hedges and Larry Coryell. But Shawns approach in general really still isn't too different from Fahey who himself leaned his ideas in folk, jazz, blues or just anything, only Shawn adds new music and avant-garde to it, as Fahey might have done if he had been born later, and if someone similar as he had already founded what he did. The fluent playing and vision of Persinger is that of a jazz artist. The new tonal combinations lean more to new classical music. The structured evolution always keeps technical clarity in the first place, and anything that happens is derived from a technically gifted fingerpicking style, skilled to the bone marrow. Recommended !
