blackshaw_echoesLet's cut to the chase: large swathes of Litany of Echoes are ravishingly beautiful. The precision of James Blackshaw's guitar technique is such that his twelve strings sound more like a harpsichord than any other guitar player I can think of. His melodies swoon inside intricate repetitive rhythms as each section of his compositions locks into each other like cogs in an elaborate piece of clockwork. But don't be fooled in to thinking this is a cold mechanistic kind of music, Blackshaw's playing is as warm and pleasing to the senses as burnished brass. This is not simply a guitar player's album either. Fran Bury adds carefully-judged violin and viola to the finely-wrought design and Blackshaw abandons his guitar for piano on the opening and closing tracks. Both musicians are completely focussed on uncovering the beauty within Blackshaw's compositions by cutting away all superfluous instrumental technique and letting each note ring out and fold itself around its companions. Blackshaw's admiration of French expressionist composers such as Debussy and Ravel is evident in the lushness of the sound he creates and the way his compositions allude to non-Western musics without indulging in pastiche or simple exoticism. Other, more contemporary, points of comparison are the more mellow moments in Sonic Youth's discography. Bury's droning strings add a necessary astringency to the sweet textures, sometimes seeming to imitate carefully-controlled electric guitar feedback, at other times sounding reminiscent of bagpipes. This is complex, delicately-structured music, but long way from the John Fahey-inspired 'American primitive' music James Blackshaw was once associated with. In common with his sometime-collaborator Jozef Van Wissem's recent A Priori, these recordings have roots that reach down to the Medieval mystery at the beginnings of European music and leaves that soak in the white-hot heat of new creation. -- Nick Ilott.
:: James Blackshaw/Litany Of Echoes - Tompkins Square Records/A-Musik.
