Rick Deitrick

Rick Deitrick, a guitarist, composer, and improviser now living in California, creates music that deliberately evades standard genre boundaries even though he works exclusively in standard tuning. Nature, especially the rivers that thread through the Western United States, supplies his chief inspiration, and he frequently writes while sitting beside them. His first recording, the privately pressed Gentle Wilderness from 1978, circulated only through direct sales at performances and record stores. For the next four decades he continued to document his work solely at home. In 2016 Tompkins Square placed the track “Messy Christa” on Imaginational Anthem Vol. 8: The Private Press; the following year the label reissued Gentle Wilderness together with the previously unheard River Sun River Moon, both drawn from the same era. Home Grown: Recordings 1969–1979 appeared in 2018, while Coyote Canyon, issued in 2021, gathered eight pieces mostly cut between 1972 and 1975 plus one from 1999. In 2023 Tompkins Square released the five-disc retrospective The Unguitarist: Complete Works, 1969–2022, which gathered the four earlier albums plus a disc of unreleased material titled Sage & Sand.

Born and raised in Ohio, Deitrick first took up the guitar at sixteen and immediately resolved to treat the instrument as though it had washed ashore on an otherwise uninhabited island. He therefore stripped away every formal musical convention except standard tuning itself, seeking to generate whole tones without detuning while still exploiting the full harmonic range that conventional tuning naturally provides. After relocating to California in 1968 he maintained a private home-recording practice for many years, occasionally performing at local coffeehouses, guitar pulls, and clubs. The 1978 debut Gentle Wilderness was produced in a run of five hundred copies that he sold at shows, placed in music shops, donated to libraries, and even left beside wilderness trails for passersby to discover. Decades of solitary work in California followed, much of it composed outdoors and captured at home. Compilers Michael Klausman and Brooks Rice selected “Messy Christa” for the 2016 Tompkins Square anthology, prompting label head Josh Rosenthal to oversee the 2017 reissue of Gentle Wilderness paired with River Sun River Moon. Home Grown arrived in 2018 and Coyote Canyon in 2021; the 2023 box set The Unguitarist contained compact-disc editions of all four prior releases, the additional disc Sage & Sand, archival photographs, and extensive liner notes.