Geiger von Müller plays like a man with two minds and four hands. He's primarily a solo performer, favoring slide techniques and focusing his efforts on coaxing aural abstractions from an acoustic guitar. The melodies he produces often have a contrariness to them that is unexpected level and congenial- as if they are an opposing viewpoint on some topic of normative value- a contradiction that you had not previously considered but which comes from a legitimate, outside perspective. It almost sounds like he's rattling off chords in front of a mirror and his reflection is playing counter harmonies. His performance represents both himself and a stranger who shares his body, and the man on the inside certainly has some funny ideas. Each stroke of his guitar is a point and a contention, a refutation of the previous chord that also acts as its proponent and champion. Beckoning past recollections while irreparably impacting the future from a lean and narrow territory of time that slices and folds itself in half only to bend back into shape, whole and de-stressed. His latest album Slide Sonatas I. considers the American blues as raw material on which to practice is a self-constructed manual of sonic origami. His uniquely articulate and strident style makes chords that reflect life in the mountains flutter like harpstrings brushed by the wings of a stork, renditions inspired by downhome porch ditties ring out like a chorus of electronic crickets, and dirt-road ambling melodies come to resemble the motion of tracing the circumference of a ufo as it weaves between the tips of skyscrapers below a star-speckled sky. Whatever dimension Geiger learned to play the blues in, it was certainly a more interesting reality than the one you or I inhabit.
