Yeah, maybe Occam's razor is best applied here. It's just a custom one-off guitar, made clearly in the Alembic style, for someone who had that taste and could afford it.
Facts: there are no Alembic parts in this guitar, and no one at Alembic remembers it. Rick Turner didn't claim to either, when still living. None of the usual folks you think of... Doug Irwin didn't, nor Brian Smith. So there is no apparent direct connection. The guitar doesn't appear modified either. It was built this way by someone very skilled.
And there's the mystery. I'm willing to accept the possibility there's folks we never heard of that could have made that guitar. What I can't accept is this is the first, or only one they made.
Other questions; where did they get their templates? This guitar appears to be a combination of a couple things. The symmetrical-horned upper body is uncannily like early Alembic patterns, but with more roundover. The lower bout is more of a mid-70's Omega-cut Series guitar. The points of the Omega don't come back to the neck beam, for instance, another tell. It also isn't shaped like the earlier ones with a bit of oblong shape like the Marmaduke guitar or the Santana custom. There's another Omega-cut guitar that surfaced a few years ago too with no serial number, nothing like this. What we have in Joker is unique but it's as if someone had access to Alembic patterns. Even the backplates are correctly shaped and positioned on the body wings. Note they are mounted with only two screws though, a deviation.
All that's before we even mention the crazy amount of laminates. I count 9 layers each, for the neck and body. If I was guessing, that's a heavy guitar. 12 lbs plus wouldn't surprise me.
I had a better picture of the electronics cavity a while back but haven't kept it, so can only speculate. I seem to remember just CT pots in there and those switches. Who knows what they all do, or if they work. But it's fascinating how they must have thought this out. 7 knobs, 6 switches. Assuming the one offset from the cluster is master volume. Bridge and neck pickups are HB's, so a couple switches probably coil-tap and/or phase. A set of 3 switches to enable or disable pickups? I get dizzy thinking about how the rest of it might work. The last time I saw a jack-on-the-back was a Turner Model 27, for what that's worth.
Whoever John Cole was, he had some very high expectations!
