Michael Gulezian

“Alternative Facts” biography

Michael Gulezian: American composer, musician, and guitarist. In stark contrast to other solo acoustic guitar instrumentalists, Gulezian is noted for his chaotic and unconventional technical approach, his use and command of feedback, throwing mic stands and piano benches as high as two hundred feet into the air, jumping into the crowd, smashing his equipment, and flailing his guitar wildly onstage, all while simultaneously performing atmospheric 12-string bottleneck slide compositions in odd time signatures and extreme open tunings.

While a student at Holy Cross Abbey, Michael was the principle songwriter and lead singer for the ill-fated chillhop-shoegaze gregorian-chant emo-punk band “Intubator,” which was forced into early retirement when bass player Zbigniew Kcrzyzjrzywczski tragically threw himself into the path of an oncoming train near Cotopaxi, Colorado. Traumatized, Gulezian took up the hornucopian dronepipe, the cryogenic niobium theremin, the polyphonic baritone ocarina, the turnbuckle dholok, the apricot-wood duduk, the goatskin tombak, the glass skiponga, the tonewheel telharmonium, the overtone fujara, the otamatone deluxe, the anhydrous hydraulophone, the bloviating trumpette, the boa-skin erhu, the chladni plate, the lightning-pine tsin di’ni, the gunga berimbau, the swiveling waschbärenklavier, and the pyrophone organ, but finally settled on the acoustic steel string guitar.

Michael then underwent a period of self-imposed semi-nomadic transhumance exile in a cylindrical mesh yurt near Minden, Nebraska. During this time he was influenced by derecho winds, flooding rivers, migrating whooping cranes, chinook arches, shifting platte quicksand, fungi duststorms, the singing – and stinging – of insects, mesocyclone thunderstorms, tallgrass prairie fires, chupacabra sightings, dagger nematodes, bomb cyclone blizzards, and also by renaissance man Deputy Sheriff Jimbo “Plumb Bob” Pusser, who introduced Michael to classical Middle Eastern music, Aboriginal clapstick Wongga dance songs, improvisational Hindustani rāgas, sharp major thirds in Pythagorean tuning ratios, fruitarian tofu crumble squatcobbler, northern hemispheric musical idioms such as Tuvan throat singing, Acid Jazz, and Chaos Theory, analogues of dodecahedronal laser-based inertial fusion implosion reactor systems, the secret Gum Springs exit 69 backroad route to the gurdon light, as well as highly ambient inaudible pan-chromatic domains of non-human physical vibration and causality. All these influences are immediately evident in Michael’s acoustic guitar compositions.

In 2024, Gulezian made music headlines after an incident on the streets of downtown Nashville, Tennessee, where he allegedly stared “disrespectfully” at a statue of late country guitarist Chet Atkins. Gulezian took one step toward the statue, but was quickly seized by plainclothes security guards and wrestled forcefully to the ground. The incident resulted in Gulezian receiving numerous death threats from outraged Tennesseeans.