What’s strange about guitarist Erik Mongrain isn’t his skill or the beauty of his music. It’s the novelty of his style — something I thought would be impossible by now. The guitar is the most ubiquitous of instruments — how could there exist a technique which hasn’t been explored a thousand times before?
Mongrain calls it ‘lap tapping’, reasonably enough. A few other people play percussive guitar — Dominic Frasca, Andy McKee — but with a far more traditional guitar sound. And there doesn’t seem to be any tradition of this, though presumably history has some lone virtuosos. So Mongrain is all alone in innovation.