Mike Huguenor Surfing The Web With The Alien

A guitar virtuoso whose storied career in indie-rock and punk encompasses two of his own bands (Hard Girls and Shinobu), playing in Jeff Rosenstock’s band, and too many other projects to name, Mike Huguenor lives to push the limits of what six strings can sound like.
And so in following up X’ed, his first solo effort, with another all-guitar album that would open up new sonic possibilities and ways of thinking about a classic instrument, Huguenor knew that he had it within him to create a true pop record, alive with explosive basslines and melodic hooks, one referential of pop-rock anthems he grew up loving but informed equally by his everlasting faith in the untapped potential of guitar-playing itself.
All 10 tracks on Surfing the Web with the Alien are instrumental, and every sound you hear on the record was produced through two guitars: one electric, the other acoustic. A self-imposed limitation in many senses, this setup catalyzed Huguenor’s quest for new sounds that would make him feel something beyond lyrics. Relentlessly pursuing chord progressions, toying with tonalities, and blending intricate guitar work with melodies of gravitational force and flow, Surfing the Web with the Alien cements Huguenor’s reputation as a musician’s musician—it’s the ideal soundtrack for his life spent searching for the sublime in guitar-led songcraft.
On “Oils of Orange,” Huguenor’s chords swirl into a hypnotically slick bassline with edgy, acidic intensity, long stretches of opulent lyricism running up against rhythmic squalls of static. “Etnies Engagement Ring” replicates a disco standard’s kick-drum patterns through four-on-the-floor bass drum rhythms, even as individual strings reverberate indefinitely, while “Jaywalking Around the World” brandishes warm, carefree melodies to complement its bright, bouncy bassline. The title of “Snap the Blue Pencil!,” meanwhile, references Portugal’s history of censorship under the Estado Novo regime. “That song is the one on this record that’s not structured like a pop song; it’s much more formally open, and it’s about free expression,” he says. “It’s a command to people to feel empowered to fight back, to deny the fascist control that is clearly happening.”
At once technically polished and profoundly expressive, Huguenor’s guitar playing here is tight and exuberant, full of dynamic switches and tuneful twists, but the musical tension he creates is miraculously spacious. Building on the experimental energy of X’ed, which drew inspiration from Brazilian psychedelia and all-American jazz, Huguenor always envisioned Surfing the Web with the Alien as riding waves of pop-rock, post-punk, hardcore, and other styles that have informed his artistry, from Japanese city pop to bossa nova and samba guitar, to arrive somewhere more sonically open and exploratory.
Perhaps the track that epitomizes the album’s ethos is “The Barmecide’s Feast,” named for the Arabian Nights tale where a prince invites a beggar to a feast with empty dishes. “Starting with no other instruments and no other musicians does remind me of trying to have a feast when there’s no food,” Huguenor says. “You’re trying to make something out of nothing.”
The album’s title, which pays tribute to Joe Satriani’s platinum-selling ’87 breakthrough Surfing with the Alien, brings Huguenor back to when he first started playing guitar in middle school, when he was 12 or 13 and just starting to discover the world of music from a newly installed home computer. “All of my teenage years were spent in this introductory phase of connecting with the world, but it was a feeling condensed down to this tiny room in my parents’ house,” Huguenor recalls. “It was a strange experience, feeling that you could find anything but that you were also trapped in the suburbs, unable to go anywhere.”
Huguenor hopes Surfing the Web with the Alien can provide listeners the same optimistic sense of possibility he felt, even in those teenage doldrums, to serve as both a celebration and a call to action. “I always want my music to inspire people to feel like there is another way,” he says. “The guitar doesn’t need to be about sweep picking, the fastest playing possible, the heaviest chugging imaginable; the guitar has so many potential outcomes, and I’m just gesturing at some of them.”