Electric Eric Blowtorch

Singer/guitarist/songwriter Eric Blowtorch sings, plays, and writes reggae, ska, rocksteady, soul, rock ‘n’ roll, funk, hip-hop, Anglo-Afropop, and jazz songs with rhythm, melody, passion, and original comic timing. E.B. plays solo, in duos with selected stars, and sometimes more.

The new Eric Blowtorch album, on which E. B. plays drums, percussion, bass(electric and upright), piano, organ, guitar, and trumpet, in addition to singing, is entitled Eric Blowtorch Plays Himself. “Everybody has a gimmick,” Blowtorch claims. “Mine’s content” – emotional, communal, and political content delivered with intense guitar playing and singing.

Eric Blowtorch is an ambitious artist; some say lunatic. In fits of inspiration, E. B. put music to two tracks from Thomas Pynchon’s landmark novel Gravity’s Rainbow. One of the resulting songs appears as a ghost track at the end of the Milwaukee compilation CD Workman’s Comp. Dr. Larry Daw of The Modern World, a Pynchon fan website, describes one of E. B.’s interpretations of a Pynchon lyric as “stylistically unique and almost impossible to peg to one musical style. It shows great compositional skill and a tremendous sensitivity to what Pynchon was trying to say. It amplifies his meaning to a far greater extent that what one gets from just reading some printed words on a page.”