James Blackshaw: Litany Of Echoes

Even if British guitarist James Blackshaw just

rustled up a mystically dense weave of fingerpicked tones on his 12-string,

it'd be worth soaking up for an hour. On Litany Of Echoes, though, Blackshaw's

patience and persistence make for six instrumentals worth sifting through

several times over. "Past Has Not Passed," "Echo And Abyss," and "Shroud" each

run about 12 minutes, and each twist apart their themes at slowly varying

angles, warming up on the friction between familiar and alien. Much of the

impact comes from the way the album was recorded: Not just notes, but also the

stray, studio-unfriendly noises of instruments, build up and ripen to create

space that welcomes and disorients simultaneously. Often, the blur of arpeggios

competes with the melodies themselves, and so do the low piano notes and drones

on "Gate Of Ivory" and "Gate Of Horn." Nothing's ever fully resolved or mined

for all its possibilities, and maybe that's the trick. Blackshaw obsessively

repeats and reworks his figures, only to prove that it'd take much longer than

12 minutes to exhaust any of them.