Unstrung: Rants and Stories of a Noise Guitarist Spiral-Bound | November 1, 2022
Marc Ribot
Unstrung: Rants and Stories of a Noise Guitarist
The paperback edition of iconoclastic guitar player Marc Ribot’s darkly funny and subversive collection of writing, featuring brand-new essays not included in the hardcover.
"A slim yet powerful book in which Marc Ribot blends bits of memoir with strange little fictions, many of which are based on his own life and career."
—Wall Street Journal
"Ribot . . . produced a book that is much like his musical output: difficult to categorize but fascinating and engaging."
—Inside Hook
Throughout his genre-defying career as one of the most innovative musicians of our time, iconoclastic guitar player Marc Ribot has consistently defied expectation at every turn. Here, in the expanded paperback edition of Ribot’s first collection of writing, we see that same uncompromising sensibility at work as he playfully interrogates our assumptions about music, life, and death. Through essays—including some new material not included in the hardcover—short stories, and the occasional unfilmable film “mistreatment” that showcase the sheer range of his voice, Unstrung captures an artist whose versatility on the page rivals his dexterity onstage.
In the first section of the book, "Lies and Distortion," Ribot turns his attention to his instrument--"my relation to the guitar is one of struggle; I'm constantly forcing it to be something else"--and reflects on his influences (and friends) like Robert Quine (the Voidoids) and producer Hal Willner (Saturday Night Live), while delivering an impassioned plea on behalf of artists' rights. Elsewhere, we glimpse fragments of Ribot's life as a traveling musician--he captures both the monotony of touring as well as small moments of beauty and despair on the road. In the heart of the collection, "Sorry, We're Experiencing Technical Difficulties," Ribot offers wickedly humorous short stories that synthesize the best elements of the Russian absurdist tradition with the imaginative heft of George Saunders. Taken together, these stories and essays cement Ribot's position as one of the most dynamic and creative voices of our time.
"In Ribot's fearless playing and equally acerbic prose, silence has a mighty fight on its hands."
—California Review of Books
"At its best, Ribot’s writing resembles his music: It’s challenging, unique, and very humane."
—Washington Examiner
"[Ribot] continuously straddles the line between memoir and fiction as he travels an eclectic road of loss, justice, tribute, and blunt humor."
—Full Stop
"Unstrung . . . delivers everything one could hope from a guitar hero/activist/cultural critic: that is, complex culture and musical theory broken down into tasteful riffs, absurdist tales of our times, and plenty of sparse, unpretentious prose as well-honed as any major American writer."
—BOMB Magazine
“Not all musicians who write books know how to play a sentence. Ribot seems to have that talent. Maybe this is because he feels what he writes rather than writes what he feels. It’s the difference between favoring metonym, which Ribot does, and fetishizing metaphor, which Ribot does not . . . [What] Ribot seems to be saying in Unstrung is don’t give in to the complacency, conformity, and compliance that will eventually metastasize to your soul.”
—New City Lit
"Marc Ribot is . . . a heck of a writer, as evidenced by this anthology of essays and profiles. Ribot’s writing is intense and immediate . . . [His] varied approach leaves a reader off-kilter, subverting easy expectations, yet yielding rewards no matter the mode."
—Razorcake
"In literature as in music, addressing topics directly isn't Ribot's way. . . As a sideman—with Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Marianne Faithfull, Yoko Ono, Arto Lindsay, James Carter, Susana Baca, the Jazz Passengers, and his musical soulmate John Zorn, among countless others—he's always aimed to be direct and disruptive simultaneously, and the same goes for his writing."
—Robert Christgau, And It Don't Stop
"Unstrung is proof that the iconoclast Marc Ribot has a way with words commensurate with his guitar virtuosity . . . Ribot's is the voice of an outsider breaking through. It's the voice of an original."
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"A very interesting book."
—BVS Reviews
"Ribot is an all-American original, and this collection provides plenty of insight into his fascinating mind."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Ribot is not only a gifted musician but also a talented wordsmith, and this quirky volume will appeal to music aficionados who appreciate strong writing with observational, intelligent, and provocative themes."
—Library Journal
"Unstrung has all the honesty, original angles, beauty, and clangor found in Marc Ribot's playing. His compassionate writing about Frantz Casseus gives a human face to his calls for artists' rights. Like life itself, this book is bloody, funny, and bloody funny."
—Elvis Costello, musician
"An insightful tour through the razor-sharp mind of one of the world's most original and influential guitar masters. Ribot's acerbic wit, self-deprecating humor, and profoundly vexing love-hate relationship with all things guitar make for a fun and stimulating read."
—John Zorn, musician
"Ribot writes with great care for words, for sounds. . . A good writer, like a good musician, and Ribot is both, needs to know what they're composing to be able to understand it, maybe even do it better the next time. His stories are moving and compassionate. . . revelatory, honest, and insightful. . . "
—Lynne Tillman, from the introduction
"In the beginning, we may have thought Marc Ribot was a full-time Lower East Side tenants rights activist who moonlit as an ubiquitous downtown noise guitarist. Now we come to find out he's a phenomenal essay writer who has the nerve to be one of our loudest and most beloved electric jazz improvisers. . . [Ribot] composes essays about music and life of sublime wit, probity, and severe self-reckoning. . . "
—Greg Tate, author of Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture
"Don't let the fact that I am calling Marc Ribot a thinking musician distract from the raw and the righteous aspects of his playing and of this book. You have to love something completely to want to look for a way out. Here is more proof of Marc's love and understanding of music, of those who make it and of all the imaginings that it might jar loose!"
—Arto Lindsay, musician
Marc Ribot has released twenty-five albums under his own name over a forty-year career, exploring everything from the pioneering jazz of Albert Ayler to the Cuban son of Arsenio Rodríguez. Rolling Stone points out that "Ribot helped Tom Waits refine a new, weird Americana on 1985's Rain Dogs, and since then he's become the go-to guitar guy for all kinds of roots-music adventurers: Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, Elvis Costello, John Mellencamp." Additional recording credits include Neko Case, Diana Krall, Elton John/Leon Russell’s The Union, Solomon Burke, John Lurie’s Lounge Lizards, Marianne Faithfull, Joe Henry, Allen Toussaint, Medeski, Martin & Wood, Caetano Veloso, Allen Ginsberg, Madeleine Peyroux, Norah Jones, the Black Keys, and many others. Ribot works regularly with GRAMMY Award–winning producer T Bone Burnett and New York composer John Zorn. He has also performed on numerous film scores such as Walk the Line, The Kids Are All Right, and The Departed.