LUKE ROVINSKY

booking, lessons, correspondence:
lukerovinsky at gmail dot com

UPCOMING/RECENT

ABOUT

Luke Rovinsky is an improvising electric guitarist based in New Haven, Connecticut.

Since April 2022, he has co-organized FIM Improvisation's Radical Music series with bassist Caleb Duval, independently presenting over 70 concerts featuring themselves and a community of New England-based musicians performing with and alongside improvisers from NYC, Chicago, Berlin, Tokyo, and Mexico City. In 2024, they established FIM Records.

With Duval, Rovinsky performs in the groups Bookers with Michael Larocca, Stalwart with Ben Eidson and James Paul Nadien, Inconcinnity with Alina Jacobs and Mackenzie Kourie, Beasts with Kaelen Ghandhi, Ben Eidson, and Jeff Dragan, and eeeeeel with Noah Jacques and Crescent Malavet.

He has performed with Joe Morris, Tatsuya Nakatani, Jack Wright, Sam Newsome, Andrea Pensado, Lao Dan, Stephen Gauci, Nat Baldwin, Patrick Crossland, Ted Moore, Forbes Graham, Jamison Williams, Ayako Kanda, James McKain, Tom Weeks, Teté Leguía, Adam Matlock, and Carl Testa. His work has been featured in The New Haven Independent and Bandcamp Daily, on BBC Radio 3's Freeness and at the 2022 Catalytic Sound Festival.

DISCOGRAPHY

WORDS

"The music was beautiful...continuous state logics! Multiple logics! Reverse logics! Everyone's listening! It was alive and positive! Hooray for the Creator of the universe, that's what I would say."

- Anthony Braxton, on "Beasts II"

"Stalwart’s heavy yet lively interplay very much belongs to a thriving new school of improvised music that transcends state (and national) borders, distilling both the silliest and most serious aspects of the wider tradition’s six-plus decades of existence into an exhilarating, ever-diverse tincture...a common talking point in free improvisation “theory” is knowing when not to play. These four are well past that—they always know when not to not play."

- Jack Davidson, on Stalwart's "Blessed"
Noise Not Music

"Rovinsky’s guitar playing in particular is exploratory and responsive, and Duval and Kourie match him well...my favorite parts of Beautiful Pigs remain the jump cuts and the hard tonal shifts, the spots that only these three at this specific time could’ve come up with."

- Marc Masters, on "Beautiful Pigs"
Bandcamp Daily

"...musical ideas like tiny explosions, perhaps of live ammunition, perhaps of rubber balls or confetti, that then bounce and flutter around the room at high velocity...there is a keen sense of music from various sources being taken apart and scrambled, and of new music being built before our very ears, sometimes with the air of a furrowed brow, sometimes with the flavor of cartoon characters creating Rube Goldberg music that they already know will fail to catch their mouse, and they don’t care."

- Brian Slattery, on Bookers "HI-FI LO-IQ"
The New Haven Independent

"...the recently founded (this year) F.I.M. Records is forging a distinctive regional style around aggressive contours & timbral blending…the fact that this is music coming out of the US bears mentioning as well (especially as national creativity seems to be waning...)...Dignity presents the core duo here in a series of intense & substantial interactions...close correspondences between the instruments, but with an edge as well...these duos already seem to take a real step forward (particularly via their tightness & directness...), so I wanted to note them now, even as I'm expecting more from F.I.M....”

"Strings get plucked, attacked, bent & bowed...scurrying fields of notes & timbres. Some patterns are held for a few moments, then it’s on to the next creation à la carte. And the listener doesn’t have a menu. It’s that exciting. The textures and sounds they create here are phenomenal with an ease that reveals their mastery of their respective instruments."

- Mark Daelmans-Sikkel, on "Dignity"
Vital Weekly

"...a Gargantuan tour de force of avant-garde noise rock...an absurdist reconstruction of rock, or music in general."

- Dave Tremblay on eeeeeel's "Piano-Polished..."
Can This Even Be Called Music?