Larry Marotta: Biography
Larry Marotta is a musician whose wide interests have led him to a wide range of musical experiences. From his seminal work on the South Florida noise scene to composing movie soundtracks for Buster Keaton films, from performing pieces by contemporary composer Rocco Di Pietro to onstage jamming with members of the String Cheese Incident, or from his ragtime guitar pieces to performing with noted musical free improvisers, his quest for self expression ignores the standard rules and boundaries.
He was born in East Orange, New Jersey, in 1967, and was raised in Miami, Florida. Part of a musical family, his childhood found him exposed to a steady diet of Broadway show tunes, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Stevie Wonder. He started studying the guitar at age ten, inspired by his first musical heroes Kiss. From there, he moved on to the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd. In his early teens, he discovered British progressive rock bands like King Crimson, Yes, and Genesis. Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp demonstrated that the potential of the electric guitar was larger than he first realized, which planted the seeds of his interest in exploring a wide range of musical styles and extended techniques on guitar. His father, a jazz drummer, inspired his interest in jazz. So while Marotta jammed in local garage bands, he also played in his school’s jazz ensemble. In his senior year of high school, he was selected to be the guitarist in the Florida All-State Jazz Band featuring Florida jazz legend Ira Sullivan.
Like many other musicians of his generation, hearing the band REM in his freshman year of college put his music in a new direction. He simultaneously lost interest in the longer, intricate works of the progressive rock bands, as well as the light, pop jazz fusion popular with most of his colleagues at the time. Instead, he delved deep into the vast 80s punk and underground rock scene, actively listening to bands like Minutemen, Sonic Youth, Bad Brains, Meat Puppets, and others. Miami has always had a highly creative punk rock scene, and soon he was playing in the trio Bill, a group mentioned in Rolling Stone magazine in 1989 as Miami’s best band. Reading, research, and listening led him deeper into the musical underground. Hearing guitarist Eugene Chadbourne with the band Shockabilly was a revelation, and led to discovering guitarists such as Henry Kaiser, Fred Frith, Hans Reichel, and James Blood Ulmer, along with the No Wave bands of the late 1970s such as Mars, DNA, and the Contortions. When the band Bill folded, he entered the world of experimental music full time. As if to break with his past, he set fire to a guitar at the finale of his first free-improvised solo guitar performance, an event that is still legendary in noise music circles. At this time, he started working with more experimental-minded musicians like Matthew Sperry, Bill Orcutt from Harry Pussy, and Rat Bastard from the Laundry Room Squelchers.
After studying philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, he relocated to Columbus, Ohio, in 1990. There he continued his work in experimental music, giving performances of solo free improvised guitar and playing with early Columbus experimental bands such as Den of Syringes and Hargg. He also found an interest in jazz again, and started working with local groups such as Wooden Soul and Honk, Wail, and Moan. He also found time to play guitar with experimental jam band Enivob Nez, industrial thrash group Urban Grind Corps Guerillas, and well-respected hip-hop group Poets of Heresy.
His work as a composer of silent movie soundtracks began in the mid-90s. He was invited to be part of an Avant-Garage event: an annual performance of musicians in Columbus performing live scores to classic silent movies. For his first outing, he composed and performed a still talked-about score for Fernand Leger’s Ballet Mechanique for guitar, tapes, and vacuum cleaner. A hit with the audience and fellow musicians alike, it led to more offers to compose and perform silent film scores at such prestigious venues as the Cleveland Cinematheque, the St. Louis Art Museum, and the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio. Eventually he was commissioned by Kino International to write a soundtrack for the Douglas Fairbanks silent comedy The Mystery of the Leaping Fish. More commissions from Kino followed. His soundtracks for several Buster Keaton comedies have appeared on Turner Classic Movies, while others of his scores have appeared on DVDs released by Kino.
In the 2000s, he began touring nationally as a free improvising guitarist, playing both solo and in group settings. Hard to pin down, some performances find him quietly exploring the sounds hidden in the acoustic guitar, while others find him adding noise and feedback to encounters with laptop and electronics artists. Some of his playing partners have included Burning Star Core, Ryan Jewell, Envenomist, Mike Shiflet, Kyle Bruckmann, Ernst Karel, Tatsuya Nakatani, James Ilgenfritz, Neil Feather, Kurt Johnson, Ben Bennett, Mark Saric, and many others. In the past few years he has worked extensively with modernist composer Rocco Di Pietro, performing on such pieces as Lost for Christian Boltanski and The Prison Dirges. Di Pietro’s piece Later, which was written for Marotta’s unique guitar playing, was performed in 2009 at Stanford University.
Most recently, he wrote and performed a score for the silent film Un Rien Que Les Heures for the Kino International DVD Avant-Garde Volume 3 (Experimental Cinema 1922-1954). Cradled in the Big White Phone, a trio recording he made with the trio La Caja (also featuring John M. Bennett, voice, an Ben Bennett, drums> is now available through Luna Bisonte.
