Michael Gulezian is an American composer and fingerstyle guitarist. He is noted for dramatic compositions, a penchant for manipulating metre, an affinity for open tunings, and an unconventionally free two-handed technical approach. Gulezian's use of bottleneck slide on 12-string guitar, coupled with his command of reverse analog reverbs have made his recordings notable for their dream-like sonic atmosphere. Gulezian inhabits a musical territory between his mentor John Fahey and Gulezian's friend and colleague Michael Hedges. Biography Gulezian was born 1957 in Newark, New Jersey. He began playing acoustic guitar at the age of six; although he never took formal lessons, he underwent years of self-imposed classical guitar training. He was influenced by his mother, who sang Armenian folk songs, and his father, classical Middle-Eastern oud virtuoso and Pharonic Egyptian ethnomusicologist H. Aram Gulezyan. Gulezian immersed himself in his Armenian cultural heritage, Middle Eastern music, non-Western Indian and Chinese music, improvisational rāgas, as well as Western idioms such as Gregorian chants, rock, jazz and folk.,, In 1965 the family moved from the New York City area to Tucson, Arizona. As a young guitarist he was influenced by the early Mississippi Delta fingerstyle guitarists: Mississippi John Hurt, Bukka White, Son House, and Robert Johnson, as well as their contemporaries from the Atlantic seaboard, Blind Blake and Reverend Gary Davis. Later he discovered and explored the music of John Fahey and Leo Kottke, and further broadened his musical horizons by listening to Keith Jarrett, John McLaughlin, Ravi Shankar and Sun Ra. While attending Colorado's Holy Cross Abbey, Gulezian studied Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, and James Joyce, who became a significant influence on his perception of language, music, linear time, Roman Catholicism, and temporal reality. While still in high school, Gulezian was introduced to John Fahey through Robbie Basho. After recording his first self-published album Snow on his own Aardvark Records imprint, Gulezian signed to John Fahey's Takoma Records label. Snow was re-released in 1980 (with minor modifications) to a global audience on Takoma/Chrysalis as Unspoken Intentions. It received international critical acclaim, and established Gulezian as a visionary artist; musicians such as Henry Kaiser and Michael Hedges cited Unspoken Intentions as a major influence. In the midst of Gulezian's accelerating professional success, the Takoma label went bankrupt. Disillusioned with the music industry, Gulezian returned to college and graduated with honors, with degrees in entrepreneurship and marketing from the University of Arizona’s Eller Center for