Ryley Walker

Ryley Walker is one of the most intrepid guitarists of his generation and of this early century. A blown-out psych excursion with Kikagaku Moyo, bands built with deep jazz improvisers, riverine prog odysseys guided by his elegant playing, even a full-length cover of the Dave Matthews Band’s famously lost album? That is just a sample of what Walker has done in the last dozen years. After moving to Chicago in his early 20s, Walker dove headlong into the city’s tight-knit and far-reaching experimental scene, recruiting players like Frank Rosaly and Whitney Johnson for gorgeous records that reflected immersions in the assorted folk phases of the British Isles. Those early records hinted at broader ambitions that soon came to pass, from full-length collaborations with drummer Charles Rumback and guitarist Bill MacKay to a committed trio with Ryan Jewell and Andrew Scott Young that often plunged into immersive improvisation.

But Walker’s audacity became evermore clear on 2021’s Course in Fable, a daringly transitional album produced by Tortoise’s John McEntire that signaled an interest in structurally complex songcraft, spaces where sparkling melodies could route through the tunnels of prog and emerge warped and novel. Since Course in Fable, Walker has gotten sober, moved between New York and New England, and settled in Los Angeles. As he long has, Walker is currently pursuing a fresh approach, sending his guitar through software to scramble or multiply the signal, alternately creating alien effects that suggest the mirrored abstraction of Markus Popp or gentle passages that recall the reserved beauty of Jim O’Rourke. It’s a promising avenue for Walker, who has, at his best, mixed a reverence for and erudition from the past with the desire to make something new, to bring what has already come into the path of what may be coming.