Keith Rowe

In 2008 at Tate Modern, London, Rowe performed a live collaborative work The Room with film makers, Jarman award winner Luke Fowler, and Peter Todd as a part of the programme accompanying the major retrospective of the painter Mark Rothko. The Room featured films by Fowler and Todd and live guitar improvisation by Rowe with subsequent iterations being presented in France and Spain and the Netmage festival in Bologna Italy. The Room is also the title of a work by Rowe issued on CD in 2007 followed by The Room Extended in 2016 on a four CD set both from erstwhile records.

Rowe began his career playing jazz in the early 1960s with Mike Westbrook and Lou Gare. His early influences were guitarists Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian, and Barney Kessel. But he grew tired of what he considered the genre's limitations. He began experimenting. An important step was a New Year's resolution to stop tuning his guitar—much to Westbrook's displeasure. He began playing free jazz and free improvisation, abandoning conventional guitar technique. He was featured in 'Crossing Bridges', a 1985 music programme based around jazz guitar improvisation, and broadcast by Channel 4

Keith Rowe (born 16 March 1940 in Plymouth, England) is an English free improvisation tabletop guitarist and painter. Rowe is a founding member of both AMM in the mid-1960s and M.I.M.E.O. Having trained as a visual artist, his paintings have appeared on most of his albums. He is seen as a godfather of EAI (electroacoustic improvisation), with many of his recordings having been released by Erstwhile.