2

2 is perhaps best described as an experimental, oddly appealing mixture of folk-rock and avant-garde noise rock. On these recordings -- which were made over a two-year period from 2001-2003 -- Dwyer plays a calm, reflective, even pastoral acoustic guitar that interacts with bizarre collages of dissonant electro-noise. It's almost as if he united the picker school of acoustic folk-rock guitar playing -- that is, musicians like John Fahey, Leo Kottke, Peter Lang and Stefan Grossman -- with the noisemakers of rock's avant-garde (although 2 has its share of vocals and isn't strictly an instrumental album). People in the jazz world like to describe this type of approach as "inside/outside" -- in other words, contrasting something that is conventional with something that is left of center. 2 isn't jazz, although it demonstrates that inside/outside contrasts can also work well if a musician has folk and rock on his mind.