The mystery of Master Wilburn Burchette 💫

 

Did you know one of the strangest guitar records of the 1970s wasn’t made in a studio—but conjured like a ritual?

I only heard about Master Wilburn Burchette and his quite elusive, rare and expensive records in early Eighties from one of my discs-pusher, Franco Zanetti… this music wasn’t to be found in records shops but only mail-ordered to the artist himself..

Knowing my deep and sincere interest for the likes of John Fahey and Robbie Basho, he insisted ‘til I bought a couple of the Master’s himself and it was an epiphany.

California mail-order mystic turned self-taught guitarist, Master Wilburn Burchette spent the early ’70s translating the unseen into sound. Obsessed with both music theory and parapsychology from a young age, he built his own instruments, studied harmony like a system of equations, and began shaping what he called “tonal pictures.” Between 1971 and 1977, he released seven albums in seven years. Records like Guitar Grimoire framed music as something closer to ritual than entertainment, each track mapping out a kind of inner vision.

Burchette placed cryptic ads in the back pages of obscure magazines, offering a Psychic Meditation Course that taught people not just how to hear music, but how to actually listen to it. His albums came with dense instructions and philosophical notes, guiding listeners to engage with sound as a tool for awareness. To him, music wasn’t passive, it was a way to interact with consciousness itself, driven by intention, emotion, and what he saw as a kind of everyday “magic.”

Listen to this (it’s on Spotify) and you’ll find yourself in some California Mount Tamalpais’ stargate.

This music, which - as I told you - I discovered in early ‘80s, deeply inspired and influenced my way of playing and improvising.

At the core of his thinking was a stripped-down view of the occult. He didn’t believe in witches or magic the way religion or horror stories describe them. Instead, he saw “magic” as intuition, hunches, pattern recognition, the mind working ahead of explanation.

At the height of it, he walked away. He burned his materials, stopped making music, and reinvented himself as a psychic under another name, publishing newsletters and making a living on predictions. Decades later, still elusive and wary of attention, he stuck to one guiding principle that defined both his work and his disappearance: preserve the mystery.

The ongoing reissue series is rooted in that same principle. Since 2015, we’ve worked to preserve and reintroduce Burchette’s recordings as they were meant to be experienced, carefully archiving original materials and faithfully reproducing the texts, inserts, and ephemera that accompanied each release, restoring the complete context of his work for a new audience while honoring the strange, deliberate world he created.

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Master Wilburn Burchette was an American musician (guitar, synthesizer) and "mail order mystic". Born in 1939 in California (USA). Found dead in 2023 (aged 84) in the home he shared with his brother Kenneth (also found dead, aged 76) in El Cajon near San Diego (USA). 

Burchette was a largely selt-taught guitarist and self-taught mystic, whose fascination with the occult began around the age of 12 when he "had been transfixed by the parapsychological, spending as much time reading books on Tibetan mysticism fundamentals as he did practicing guitar, the vibrations of which he used to create tonal pictures and patterns." 

After time spent teaching classical guitar, he constructed an Impro guitar with 6 different woods, with mahogany for the base, soft pine, elder, and rosewood. The neck was inlaid with abalone shells. 

Then, in the 7 years between 1971 and 1977, he released 7 albums of guitar and synthesizer music, mostly via his Burchette Brothers label (run jointly with his brother Kenneth, a chemist). He advertised these albums via mail order ads, hidden in the back pages of Fate Magazine, Beyond Reality, and Gnostica News. 

On offer: Burchett's seven-part, block-printed "Psychic Meditation Course," designed to teach people how to listen to music. To go along with his lessons: his instrumental guitar and electronic records featuring ornate hand-drawn cover designs, complete with listening instructions from the master himself. After 1977, he abruptly burnt and discarded everything related to his musical explorations.