BACK STORY: DEITY OF THE DALES

● In the past 10 years Chapman has accrued an enviable list of testimonials from the alt-rock crowd. 50 producer and co-guitarist Steve Gunn says, “His endless drive and unique voice serve as a model of what it means to be an artist,” while William Tyler regards him as “a titanic guitar picker and an heroic and inspiring personality,” However, it’s Thurston Moore who goes further still, saying, “He shreds on acoustic guitar the way Kandinsky wails with a paintbrush,” and “that sound [Chapman achieved] on 1972’s Millstone Grit, it could possibly be the first sort of hollow-body feedback on record I know of. It’s a sound I’ve always been using when I do noise improvisation.”