Steffen Basho-Junghans

Experimental musician and visual artist Steffen Basho-Junghans first gained recognition through his singular approach to the guitar. His performances draw on an array of extended techniques while evoking the modal inflections of North Indian raga alongside strains of American folk tradition, placing his work in close kinship with guitarist John Fahey. Born in Saxony, Germany, during 1953, he helped establish the German folk ensemble Wacholder in 1978. Shortly afterward he began staging solo recitals on steel-string guitar. Throughout the 1980s he played a leading organizational role in Germany, launching a guitar festival in Berlin in 1981 and assuming direction of the Berlin Guitar Center five years later. On his own Blue Moment Arts imprint he issued several recordings in Germany, the earliest being 12 String Solo in 1989; wider availability in the United States arrived only with the 2000 release of Song of the Earth. The solo-guitar albums Inside and Waters in Azure appeared in 2001 and 2002, respectively, while Landscapes in Exile also surfaced in 2002 on Blue Moment Arts.