King’s personalized guitar is another example of her connection with the mechanics of her music. You can hear King using the bridge on the meditative “Teek.”

The passerelle is a metal object that acts as a second bridge, fitting under the guitar’s strings and dividing them into two playable sections in a setup that resembles that of the Japanese koto or Chinese guzheng. Speaking of inventiveness, Modern Yesterdays happens to incorporate a new invention, designed by King in collaboration with Providence-based luthier Rachel Rosenkrantz (profiled in the March/April 2020 issue), called the passerelle bridge. Compositions like “Rhythmic Tiny Sand Ball Patterns,” “Lorlir,” and “Default Shell,” in particular, illustrate their inventive collaboration. As King says, the recording “would have been this companion soundtrack that was a snapshot in time.” Collaborating with sound designer Chloe Alexandra Thompson, King returns with her trademark exploratory, percussive textures and seas of slowly unraveling moods, this time couched in Thompson’s undulating sonic scenes. Unfortunately, the show’s production came to a halt in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 lockdown.īut out of something lost rose something new-the soundtrack to the unborn show, released as an album, Modern Yesterdays. She had big plans for 2021 with a new multimedia show entitled Data Not Found-with themes around modern technology and its effects on our world. From the July/August 2021 issue of Acoustic Guitar | By Kate KoenigĪfter you’ve spent your whole career pushing the guitar to its limits, where do you go next? Kaki King has been working on answering that question since her 2014 show The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body, a multimedia production hatched at Brooklyn’s BRIC in which visuals were displayed on her signature Ovation guitar using projection mapping.

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