experimental · shred

Buckethead

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A KFC bucket, a white mask, and some of the fastest and strangest guitar playing anyone has committed to tape.

Buckethead is the stage name of Brian Patrick Carroll, born in 1969 and raised in a Southern California suburb near Disneyland, the youngest of five children of a father who worked as an athletic director at a local high school. An introverted child, he spent most of his time alone with books, games and martial-arts memorabilia, when not at Disneyland itself.

He picked up guitar at 12, first taught by an elderly neighbor, and became serious about it a year later after his family moved to Claremont; his teachers there included Paul Gilbert. The Buckethead persona arrived after he watched the slasher film Halloween 4 in 1988, bought a blank white mask like the killer's, and added an inverted KFC bucket that same night while eating dinner.

He performs wearing that white expressionless mask and bucket, playing with extremely fast alternate picking and tapping that shifts abruptly into ambient, banjo-like or nursery-rhyme passages, and maintains an unusually large recorded output, much of it self-released in numbered series.

His solo catalogue runs to 31 studio albums, alongside seven more released under the anagram alias Death Cube K. Since 2011 he has issued hundreds of shorter releases in a numbered Pike series, many of them live recordings. Guitar World has credited him with ushering in a new era of guitar virtuosity while also naming him among its lists of the fastest and strangest guitarists.

He has worked with Bill Laswell and Bootsy Collins in Praxis, recorded with Bernie Worrell and others, contributed to film soundtracks, and collaborated with musicians including Viggo Mortensen, Melissa Reese and DJ Disk. He served as lead guitarist in Guns N' Roses from 2000 to 2004, recording on the long-delayed album Chinese Democracy and touring its early legs. His live sets often include nunchaku routines and robot dancing between passages of playing.

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