Bill Nace

Bill Nace is a Brooklyn-based guitarist and sound artist known for improvised performance using prepared instruments, feedback, and unconventional objects as sound sources.

Bows, glass bowls, hurdy-gurdy, doughnut pipe. Bill Nace treats the electric guitar less as an instrument than as a site of inquiry, pulling sound out of it by any means available. Based in Philadelphia, he has spent two decades in the free-improv underground, releasing a sprawling catalog of collaborative records on his own Open Mouth label alongside solo LPs on Drag City. The question he keeps returning to is whether a guitarist rooted in folk, rock, and punk can find a space between those traditions that belongs entirely to him. His work with Kim Gordon as Body/Head (abrasive, slow-burning, physically heavy) is the most visible version of that search. But the solo records, the visual work, the label: they're all pulling at the same thread.