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 ocarina, the svelt harmonium, the glass skiponga, the pump theremin, the turnbuckle dholok, the otamatone deluxe, the goatskin tombak, the anhydrous hydraulophone, the bloviating trumpette, the boa-skin erhu, the hornucopian dronepipe, and the pyrophone organ, but finally settled on the acoustic steel string guitar. He underwent a period of self-imposed exile in a cylindrical mesh yurt near Minden, Nebraska. During this period he was influenced by the wind, flooding rivers, the singing of insects, by thunderstorms, and also by Deputy Sheriff Jimbo “Plumb Bob” Pusser, who introduced Michael to classical Middle Eastern music, non-Western Classical Indian and Chinese music, improvisational rāgas, northern hemispheric musical idioms such as Tuvan Throat Singing, Acid Jazz, and Chaos Theory, as well as highly ambient inaudible pan-chromatic domains of non-human physical vibration and causality.

In 2014, 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.