FM
Biography
Steve Tibbetts is a Minneapolis-based American guitarist known for an original approach to both composing and sound-forming. He was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1954. His first two records were created when he was in college. The second, Yr, although self-published, gained a degree of notice, especially from fans of the electric guitar. That record featured many overdubs, on one track as many as 50 overdubs creating a unique soundscape. Like some other artists, such as Brian Eno, Steve Tibbetts views the recording studio as a tool for creating sounds and often works and reworks his sounds, incorporating found-sound into finished musical tracks (such as the footsteps in the track "Running" found on Safe Journey, or the chanting of Nepalese villagers found on the last tracks of Big Map Idea).
The first record Tibbetts created for a major label was Northern Song, for ECM Records in 1982. This was an attempt to fit Tibbetts music into Manfred Eicher's style of very rapid recording. Usually ECM albums are recorded in just two days. However, Northern Song received scathing reviews. Perhaps as a result, Tibbetts went back to his previous method of recording very slowly over a period of months (or longer). His subsequent records gained better reviews and, somewhat unusually for ECM records, were not produced by Manfred Eicher.
