“Johnny Marr stood there for five minutes watching me use a reverb tank as a guitar bow. He must have thought it was the stupidest thing he’d ever seen”: Meet LA Priest, the inventor-guitarist questioning everything you know about tone

Sam Eastgate performing onstage.

There are guitarists who you would describe as unique because of small quirks: perhaps a distinctive vibrato, or their use of certain pedals. And there are those players who are actually singular in their approach to the instrument. Sam Eastgate of LA Priest is very much in the latter camp.

Surrounded by a wall of self-built pedals, DIY synth gear (most notably his drum machine GENE) and a ’60s PA tube amp he dug out of a dumpster, his playing lies at the nexus of synth and guitar, celebrating the anarchic qualities of both instruments – the two greatest democratizing and experimental innovations of 20th century music.