I am a guitar player/composer in Oakland, CA. I have played in a wide variety of groups-- heavy rock/free jazz/improvised music/contemporary classical. My solo work draws a lot from early country and blues tunes, reworked (mangled?) in my own way. In any context I tend to tread a wobbly line between melodicism, atonality and sonic abstraction. Both solo and in groups I like to develop specific tunes/riffs/compositional ideas, and then throw musical monkey wrenches into them live, forcing them to self-destruct and collide with free improvisation. I am an extremely curious person and love a lot of very different sorts of music. www.myspace.com/avamendoza