Chaz Underriner Credit: courtesy photo

Timucua Arts Foundation’s International Guitar Festival kicks off this week, offering up a month of adventurous, adept and boundary-breaking string-benders from all over the world — from Scout to Hiroya Tsukamoto. Kicking the whole affair off, though, is an ax-wielder much closer to home: DeLand-based guitarist and composer Chaz Underriner.

It’s a bit too reductive to think of Underriner as just a local, though. Yes, his base of operation is nearby Stetson University where he’s a tenured professor in the Digital Arts department, but he’s both a hidden gem of Central Florida music and almost improbably a globe-trotting composer and performer in demand at universities and concert halls all over the United States, Europe, the U.K. and even Russia. Underriner cites a diverse slate of influences on his guitar practice that makes his own eclectic oeuvre somewhat easier to understand: Jimi Hendrix, Kenny Burrell, Wes Montgomery, Thurston Moore.

Underriner’s performances combine his expressive guitar melded to field recordings, video art and text work. Underriner also composes for chamber ensembles and small groups — as on latest albums Moving and Meditations — resulting in ghostly, serene pieces that conjure and distill the essence of natural spaces, often in Florida and the broader South.

Before the show, we suggest you pregame two recent works that check all those aesthetic boxes: Moving, released as a fetchingly designed CD on Underriner’s own Deadland Records, and Meditations, a microtonal work — bolstered by field recording excursions (undertaken at Stetson and NYU) — that Underriner worked on at an Atlantic Center residency. This album was deservedly praised by experimental bible Wire.

Befitting a restless creative mind, Underriner’s Friday set will feature material from neither of those albums — nor anything resembling a previous Timucua performance with his jazz quintet — but instead a mix of solo electric guitar/electronics pieces and chamber music with clarinetist Jessica Speak and saxophonist Tim Rosenberg all paired to his visuals.

“All of the pieces, basically, have some kind of abstract narrative happening in the video. For example, a piece I just finished that is going to have its world premiere, called ‘Lines,’ is all of these line drawings that I made on paper, maybe 40 of them, and they’re scrolling in the video in different ways,” he explains. “Along with that, the trio is playing different sections of music that go in a different pattern.”

And even though Moving is not on Friday’s musical menu, we can’t help asking about the conceptual and sonic influence that Blue Springs in Orange City had on that album.

“I did some field recordings at Blue Springs, both above water and in the water. … I spent a bunch of time there, just recording and listening to the space,” says Underriner. “I wanted to go from the above-ground sounds of Blue Springs to underwater sounds of Blue Springs, and then back above ground. It’s really subtle, but you can hear that happening.”

A bittersweet undercurrent of the place-specific compositions on Moving is that many of the places captured are also in varying degrees of peril. When one thinks of, for instance, the impacts of development and a state government (at best) asleep at the wheel as far as preserving this manatee sanctuary, the album takes on an almost elegiac tone.

“Some of my colleagues both at Stetson —Nathan Wallach in particular — and throughout the world focus on field recordings as a way of building data sets and showcasing the environment for scientific research. That’s one very concrete way that people can use field recordings to try to protect spaces,” says Underriner. “Most of the places that I did recordings of are precarious. … It was kind of unintentional, to be honest, because I just love these spaces. But all the spaces that I love happen to be in precarious situations.”

Though we continually steer the conversation back to notions of place — especially Central Florida — Underriner’s work is in many ways stateless, despite his creative practice being physically rooted in DeLand. On the one hand, there’s his record label, Deadland — after the nickname given to the oft-sleepy college town by young folks eager for adventure — and fruitful collaborations with his Stetson colleagues. On the other hand, secreted away 45 minutes up north, he flies under the radar of the Orlando avant-garde scene, moving at his own pace in peace even while in-demand as a composer worldwide.

“I’ve been in DeLand for eight years teaching at Stetson. For maybe the first five years, I pretty much kept to myself and didn’t play that much music. And all of my projects were out of town,” says Underriner. “Then after about five years, I started really wanting to spend time getting to know what’s happening in Orlando and in Gainesville and different places in Florida. … There’s so many great, interesting people here making work that’s distinctively Floridian. It’s part of why I started Deadland records, it’s a way to showcase interesting experimental work particularly stuff that’s from the South and from Florida. It’s a way of connecting me further with what’s happening.”

Deadland has so far released Moving and Water Futures, an album by Miami composer Garrett Wingfield. Underriner is mulling over future releases from New Orleans composer Christopher Trapani of percussion and electronics pieces, and maybe even compiling local punk sounds in tandem with Jesse Ritz and Derek Ridgeway of DeLand’s Sidecar. A definite as an upcoming release is what Underriner calls his “first fully jazz-ish album,” out for mastering now.

Besides the recorded work, there’s plenty more performances and commission work on the horizon for Underriner. “I have a commission for an ensemble in Antwerp. The Royal Conservatory there has commissioned me for a guitar ensemble piece. That’s the next piece I’m going to be working on, the premiere of that is going to be March 2026,” says Underriner. “I’m also working on a guitar concerto for myself to play with the Stetson Orchestra in the fall of next year.”

We’ve snoozed on Chaz Underriner for way too long. You should not repeat our mistake.

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This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 5, 2025.