Loren Connors

Loren Connors creates improvisational guitar music that resists tidy classification, though the label avant-garde comes closest to capturing its essence. Traces of experimental approaches, jazz, and blues surface regularly, along with occasional echoes of Irish traditions. The guitarist, who cites abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko as his foremost artistic influence, maintains extraordinary productivity, having issued dozens of albums, EPs, and collaborative projects—frequently in severely restricted editions—across numerous imprints under his own name and several aliases such as Loren Mattei and Guitar Roberts. His spouse, Suzanne Langille, sometimes contributes vocals to these recordings, and the pair appear together in the ensemble Haunted House. Extensive early-1980s partnerships also link him with folk singer and songwriter Kath Bloom. Connors’s little-known discs, spanning solo acoustic guitar improvisations to fractured blues interpretations, drew scant attention until the early 1990s, when reviewers began to respond and champions including Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, Gastr del Sol’s Jim O’Rourke, and Alan Licht—who has joined Connors on record along with Run On, Love Child, and Blue Humans—publicly endorsed his output. Standout titles encompass the blues-inflected improvisation of 1991’s Come Night (featuring Langille), the mournful miniatures of 1999’s Airs, and the austere, atmospheric Red Mars (2010).

From childhood onward Connors trained on violin, an experience he credits with informing his guitar vibrato, as well as trombone, and he acquired rock-and-roll bass technique. His mother Mary Mazzacane’s vocal performances exerted a strong pull; she regularly sang Johann Sebastian Bach selections at funeral services. Exposure to such classical repertoire prompted Connors to explore the works of Giacomo Puccini and Frederic Chopin, while blues artists, above all Robert Pete Williams and Muddy Waters, likewise drew his interest. He pursued art studies at Southern Connecticut University and the University of Cincinnati during the early 1970s, yet concluded that his musical ideas possessed greater originality than his paintings. By 1976 he had returned to Connecticut, and two years later he launched a series of self-released albums under the name Loren Mazzacane on his Daggett imprint. Between 1978 and 1980 he produced eight collections of unaccompanied acoustic guitar improvisations, pressing runs of only 75 to 100 copies each that were mailed to radio stations; unsold stock had to be discarded. These recordings resurfaced in 1999 as the four-CD compilation Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations, Vols. 1-9, 1979-1980, facilitated by writer and Father Yod Records founder Byron Coley, a longtime admirer.

From 1984 through 1989 Connors largely withdrew from musical activity. He wed Langille, began raising a family, experimented with writing, and received a haiku prize in Japan. Relocating to New York City in 1990, he commenced releasing material on outside labels the following year. After a 1992 Parkinson’s diagnosis, his musical direction shifted: earlier short acoustic pieces gave way to extended electric guitar explorations incorporating feedback and distortion. The 1995 album 9th Avenue marked the first release credited to Loren Mazzacane Connors; roughly a decade later he dropped his mother’s surname entirely. Much of his late-1990s catalog appeared on Portland, Oregon’s Road Cone Records, while further titles emerged on Table of the Elements, Drag City, Secretly Canadian, and Sub Rosa. Family Vineyard issued his initial collaboration with bassist Darin Gray, The Lost Mariner, in 1999.

Connors’s solo album Portrait of a Soul reached listeners in mid-2000. The Little Match Girl followed in 2001, accompanied by a second Gray collaboration, This Past Spring. His solo studio reflection on the events of September 11, 2001, The Departing of a Dream, appeared on Family Vineyard with its first volume in 2002; two additional volumes followed in 2003 and 2004, the latter constituting his final studio recording of new material for seven years. In 2003 he also released In France with guitarist Alan Licht and the distinctive collaborative effort Arborvitae with former Gastr del Sol guitarist David Grubbs.

Connors continued to issue live and archival material on multiple labels while forging closer ties with Family Vineyard, which has handled his catalog with notable attention, as demonstrated by As Roses Bow: Collected Airs 1992-2002, Night Through: Singles and Collected Works 1976-2004, Two Nice Catholic Boys (with Jim O’Rourke), Curse of Midnight Mary, Into the Night Sky, and Hymn of the North Star. The imprint has maintained visibility for reissues and fresh live projects alike. Connors returned to the studio for Family Vineyard with Red Mars, a five-part suite, issued in September 2011—five days before the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001.

In 2012 he and Langille reunited on disc for the first time in fifteen years with I Wish I Didn’t Dream, an album of live improvisations inspired by the work of artist M P Landis; the set appeared on Northern Spy, as did the following year’s The Only Way to Go Is Straight Through with Thurston Moore. My Brooklyn and a split LP with Vapour Theories surfaced in 2014. In 2015 Family Vineyard reissued one of Connors’s most treasured recordings, 1990’s Blues: The “Dark Paintings” of Mark Rothko, along with Live in New York, captured the prior year across two performances separated by six days. Between April and August 2016 the label released a sequence of singles, EPs, and collaborative works that included an untitled live set with Tom Carter, Departing of a Dream, Vol. 5 and Vol. 6, and Light with Clint Heidorn.

Two markedly contrasting Connors recordings emerged from Family Vineyard in 2017: the October release Angels That Fall, a single seventeen-minute electric-guitar-and-piano improvisation, and the December release Robert Crotty with Me: Loren’s Collection (1979-1987), which gathers previously unheard material, unseen photographs, and liner notes by Connors and Crotty’s brother, plus a bonus disc containing the first reissue of Crotty’s sole ultra-rare album Robert Crotty Blues and his “Prove It!” single, both originally issued on Connors’s private St. Joan label in the late 1980s. Recital also released Pretty as Ever in 2017, an LP drawn from 2000s-era material on Sails and The Little Match Girl.

Blank Forms Editions issued Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations, Vol. 10, recorded live before a studio audience in Woodstock, New York, in 2018. The Departing of a Dream, Vol. VII, a live performance with Daniel Carter in Brooklyn, appeared on Family Vineyard in 2019. The label released Connors’s mini-album Beautiful Dreamer in 2020.