CANCELLED: Kaki King takes the guitar to untapped – and galactic – levels in Big Sur.

Editor's note: Reports from Fernwood are that Ms. King cancelled the show herself. 

Kaki King doesn’t look any further than her guitar for inspiration.Her muse is a custom Ovation Adamas 1581-KK.

“Your guitar has very specific limitations,” she says. “It’s actually informing you about what it can do and what it can’t.”

Only King can make her guitar do a lot of things others can’t: Her fingerstyle is an unprecedented fusion of slap bass and Eddie Van Halen percussive fret-tapping – then she employs looping to add more layers to her one-woman operation.

King’s six full-length records have been described as everything from post-jazz to shoegaze, but when it comes down to it, there isn’t any one genre it fits.

“Many of the musicians of my generation try to remain genre-agnostic,” King says. “There’s nothing you can’t learn from; there’s no music that’s not worth investigating and there’s no reason to claim, ‘This is the kind of music I make.’ It’s always been hard for people to classify me, and that’s a good thing.”

King isn’t bothered when genres are ascribed; she is, however, irked when she’s compared to other artists.

“I’m not going to tell you who influenced me but I will tell you how [a song] makes me feel,” King explains. “Every time I write a song it’s all about searching and desire. Music should make you feel like you want something bigger, like there’s something more out there.”

The Brooklyn-based musician’s originality and technical knowledge has yielded performances with the likes of Timbaland and the Foo Fighters, as well as film and TV soundtrack gigs. She earned a Golden Globe nomination for work on the Into the Wild soundtrack with Eddie Vedder and Michael Brook.

With her 2012 guitar-heavy Glow – featuring the string quartet ETHEL – King opens with “Great Round Burn,” a speedy orchestral overture that would be perfect car chase music. After nearly a year of touring behind Glow – Saturday’s show at Fernwood is one of her last – King will delve into building a complex lighting system projected onto her guitar while she plays. She’s also collaborating again with ETHEL on a record that will correlate with the light show.

“It will be in the same universe as Glow,” she says. “But on Glow the guitars were very unprocessed, as far as pedals; on the next album, I’ll being doing the songs live, and relying on a lot of pedals to change the guitar sound.”

And showing us the amazing things she and a guitar can do.

Kaki King performs at 10pm Saturday, Dec. 7, at Fernwood Resort, 47200 Highway 1, Big Sur. $22/advance; $25/door. 667-2422, www.fernwoodbigsur.com

HERE MORE HERE >> www.kakiking.com