"Mallet Guitars Three" is the third release by Liverpool-based ensemble Ex-Easter Island Head. 

Following on from 2012’s critically acclaimed "Mallet Guitars Two / Music for Moai Hava", Mallet Guitars Three is a thirty minute, four movement summation of the group's singular approach to creating music for solid bodied electric guitar, percussion and other instruments. 

The album was written over a period of eighteen months and refined during performances alongside contemporaries including Barn Owl, James Blackshaw, Oval and Grumbling Fur, in venues as diverse as a library on the Scottish Isle of Iona to London's Union Chapel. Recorded live in a former nursing home turned group headquarters, the piece expands the open-tuned, guitar-struck minimalism of previous releases into an ambitious suite of impressionistic, propulsive electric chamber music. 

Utilising four prepared ‘Third Bridge' guitars and three players, the group's signature interlocking rhythms are configured into a dense array of clicking call-and-response patterns and droning down-tuned strings. The treated guitars create a complex array of choral overtones and crystalline harmonics, sounding in unison with an array of handbells and prayer bowl percussion. 

From moments of intimate amp-hum ambience to clattering polyrhythms, the piece exploits the possibilities of metal-bowed strings to create radiant microtonal passages of harmony and discord, resulting in an otherworldly progression through melodic stasis and resolution akin to the vocal works of Ligeti and the infinite drones of the Theatre of Eternal Music.

Reviews:

“Mallet Guitars Three thrums with a growing confidence and compositional adventurousness. Echoes of Rhys Chatham, Steve Reich and Glenn Branca are easily discernible amongst its shifting overtones and propulsive clockwork rhythms; yet the scale of their third album is intimate, with its four connected parts totalling under half and hour.

Freed from the plectrum method of tension followed by release, the mood is euphoric rather than aggressive. Notably, the two bookending movements eschew rhythmic pulse in favour of blurred and twinkling textures. The first opens with plangent chimes and lingering harmonic shadows before unfurling into part musical chandelier, part mythical Sirens' island; the conclusion luxuriates in glistening multiphonics reminiscent of Vibracathedral Orchestra's hive mind.

In between the clattering wooden sticks, nagging micro-melodies and subtle shifts in perspective travel more familiar minimalist paths. Yet with human imprecision trumping metronomic accuracy, the repetition is playful rather than intense, more akin to a stroll through a bamboo forest than being hammered with mallets”

- Abi Bliss, Wire magazine November 2013.

Selected as one of the Wire's best Avant-Rock releases of 2013


“A pleasing fusion of ‘80s New York no wave ideas and more meditative drone/ambient textures, particularly effective in the opening movement of the second side here, which marries a hypnotic and organic Philip Glass-esque rhythm with the gently lulling drone chords of the struck guitars with surprisingly krauty effects, the focus being on the slowly morphing rhythmic clicks as the ringing strings produce a huge ringing chord whose emphasis keeps shifting imperceptibly.

The other piece on this second side impresses too, with unsettling (bowed? Sounds like it...) drones sliding around queasily in gliding layers of glissando clamour that’s like a cross between a string section tuning up and one of Rhys Chatham’s huge guitar ensembles. If you like experimental music but find it can often seem like a chore to listen to, I suggest you give this lot a try.”

- Norman Records, 2013