Album Reviews

For those of you who know the pleasures of guitarist John Fahey’s Takoma recordings (Fahey was a rabid audiophile, BTW), or Robbie Basho’s, or even Sandy Bull’s extraordinary experiments in guitar-based world music fusion on Vanguard, James Blackshaw may already be on your radar screen, as may some of the other contemporary guitar experimenters who fly equally low beneath the mainstream musical radar screen, but until this LP, I’d not encountered the 24 year old Blackshaw who’s been recording and performing since 2003.

The untrained musician glides his fingers over a 12 string guitar to produce lysergic-like hypnotic, drones and repetitive patterns that shimmer and float in the ether and will have you doing likewise seconds after the needle drops into the lead-in groove on this strikingly well-recorded LP (whatever technology was used).

Blackshaw’s repetitive, rolling figures may remind minimalist fans of Glass, Reich and some others, structurally, though the guitarist generates sonic beauty on a hypnotic, you might say cosmic scale that will have your mind probing stellar heights even as your body sinks into a deep relaxation that starts in the chest and exits through the toes.

The young man’s impossibly fast fingers weave crystalline, flowing neon webs that fade gently into the deftly inserted reverb, leaving a deeply felt afterglow that turns into a long-lived residue of well-being.

The recording is clean and transparent with the guitar set against a jet-black backdrop. A late evening mystical treat you’ll find yourself repeating often. In fact, ever since first playing this gem late one night, all subsequent evenings have felt incomplete without ending a listening session with one side or both.

I cannot recommend a record with greater enthusiasm than I do this.

By the way, to answer the question in the caption, clearly he's heading elsehwere! He may be English but this leaves the folk music of Renbourn and Jansch way behind.