Sylvia Juncosa

This post is for Lexicon Devil and Pig State Recon. All that SST/SWA/et. al. and very few props for the female Jimi Hendrix, Sylvia Juncosa. OK, that's not true; here's what the fabled SWA dissertation that PSR reran had to say:

And, for a short time, he was in a band with Juncosa, who isn’t well-recognized enough as a massive guitar player. Sylvia Juncosa deserves championing, not pity. As technologically adept as she was technically proficient, her playing in SWA fused noise, psychedelic, heavy metal, the “SST sound,” surf, and an unparalleled lusty, sensuality that balanced and complimented Merrill’s chemically amplified testosterone. The SWA release XCIII documented her playing well, never to be recaptured on vinyl, tape, or CD; in fact, no format accurately contained the sound and fury of her playing except live, eardrum-bursting performances in smelly, smoke-filled clubs: it was the most distorted vision of beauty I remember from the 80s. Juncosa played with the tyranny of the senses to the tyranny of reason, for no reason, and when the impulse to play, merely for the sake of playing, is followed, we cease to be governed by either sensuousness or rationality; technology is merely there, a force which signifies nothing, expresses nothing, but which was being made to express nothing beyond its own momentum. She herself was force. Like free association, her playing was not tuneless, but so irrationally tuneful that it disrupted normal synaptic discourse, breaking the logical connectives of neurotic discourse, and inscribing a new pattern to destabilize normal brain function only to almost simultaneously reinscribe itself into the neural network as insidiously as an obsession, as bluntly as a guillotine. The experience was like grabbing a downed powerline in the rain. To classify her guitar playing as merely heavy-metal is like comparing a close range shotgun blast to a bee sting.

The only time I remember seeing SWA was with Juncosa - the L.A. Street Festival and the fact that I can recall that brief set is certainly a sign of her blastitude. I would've liked to have done a fuller retrospective but I do not currently have digital copies of the To Damascus records nor Winter, the SWA record she was on, (if you could help me rectify that, I would be eternally grateful) and The Leaving Trains album she played keyboards on is available from the fine, eclectic blog, Xhol Desert. So I'll give you some tracks from her solo albums which seem to be still available. Some people ding them for her singing but there's no denying the playing. The website bearing her name is copyrighted 2007 but gives no clue as to what she is up. I'll try sending a mail and see what happens.

From One Thing
One in Three
Demon
The System

From Nature
Lick My Pussy Eddie Van Halen
Broken
On the Spot


Some more info here.