Hendrix With Ko

The Hendrix reference is audacious but earned through sound rather than borrowed through name: the track engages genuinely with the psychedelic guitar tradition, instruments pushed toward and past the edge of recognizability, sounds bent and extended beyond conventional playing technique into something new. But Snaith's version is distinctly his own — filtered through mathematical precision and electronic sensibility, the guitar's wildness contained within a production framework the original psychedelic tradition lacked the tools to imagine. Ko may be a specific person; the music has the quality of collaborative work, something made in the presence of another, responsive and dialogic rather than solitary and self-sufficient. There's an energy here that suggests real-time musical conversation, performers responding to each other in the room, chance and spontaneity preserved within the recorded artifact rather than edited away. For students of rock history, the track functions as a thoughtful engagement with received tradition; for listeners without that context, it works as unusually energetic, slightly strange music with excellent guitar noise at its center. Snaith's intellectual relationship to musical history is rarely this explicit or this exhilarating — his enthusiasm for the conversation unmistakably audible in every bent note.