Steve Kimock pleases himself with new album

The spacious and sometimes thrilling music on this solo album, improvised on many kinds of guitars and synthesizers, “morphs acoustic and electronic sounds,” as Kimock puts it in his eminently readable and funny liner notes.

Some of those sounds are layered in whirling and floating orchestrations flavored with birdsong (made with electric guitar feedback) and summoning the entrancing Indian-imbued music of Terry Riley, John Coltrane and the Beatles.

There are also some lovely stripped-down melodies played on various acoustic steel-string instruments, and an amusing piece played as a jazz waltz in a noisy restaurant, “The Artist Dies and Goes to Hell.”

“The whole point was the stuff I didn’t do on the road — the acoustic stuff, the electronic explorations I enjoy,” says Kimock, on the phone from Sebastopol, where he and his family have been living since July after moving back to the Bay Area after a decade in his native Pennsylvania.

Kimock, a multi-instrumentalist and composer with whom he’s been writing new music in this vein; bassist Bobby Vega, a colleague since the early Zero days; and vocalist Leslie Mendelson.

Among other instruments, he notes, “Twelve Is Good” — the second part of a four-song suite called “Music Tells a Story” — includes “miscellaneous ear candy from ridiculously high Regal square neck (dobro), low baritone lap (steel guitar), E harp and kalimba.”

“Big Sky,” made solely with guitar feedback altered with various devices, feels to him like equal parts ‘Mars with water’ ancient and psychedelic Native American. ...

Kimock, who’s figuring out how to play this music live (doing it with the people he has a long history and chemistry with is key, he says), still loves playing rock ’n’ roll, the whole process of “working with people and getting the music onstage for the audience.”

The archives of Other Minds, the invaluable San Francisco nonprofit dedicated to new and experimental music, are going to UC Santa Cruz, where the special collections at McHenry Library include the archives of the Grateful Dead and poet Kenneth Patchen.