James Blackshaw has made quite a name for himself in the post-Takoma school of guitar playing, coming closer than perhaps anyone to fulfilling the guitar-as-orchestra ambitions so many have harbored. He's an experimentalist, but rarely an obtuse one, and he's created some amazing, enveloping music. On The Glass Bead Game, Blackshaw's guitar is, as always, a heavenly instrument, but he continues to move further from the guy-and-guitar approach that established him, bringing in more varied instrumentation. Piano, also featured on last year's excellent Litany of Echoes, plays a far more central role here, and the record includes wordless vocals from Lavinia Blackwall, strings, flute, clarinet, and harmonium, the last of these played by Blackshaw himself.
The album opens with a stunner in "Cross". Blackshaw's dexterous fingerstyle guitar playing sets down a rhythmic and harmonic foundation as the harmonium drones in the background, and eventually the violin and cello enter, alternately augmenting the drone and splitting off to follow their own melodic lines. Blackwall handles vocals, all of them wordless and odd and wonderful. These include a harmonized rhythmic pattern and a drifting, languid melody. The specifics of each individual part, though, are not nearly so important as the overall effect-- these sounds blur together into something transfixing, a nearly impossible combination of contemplation and urgency.
Contemplation seems to dominate the rest of the album-- "Bled" explodes in a torrent of brilliant guitar in its mid-section, sounding more like an army of pluckers and strummers than just one man. But on its edges, the piece is slow and spare, as much space as actual notes. The other solo acoustic guitar piece, "Key", is flat-out beautiful, with an almost religious quality that's hard to pin down-- it sounds like it could have been captured in a church. The two piano-driven pieces lack the forward movement of the guitar-focused songs, in part because Blackshaw's keyboard technique lacks the subtly and deftness of his guitar playing. "Fix" is very pretty, accenting a nice piano part with violin and cello, but it's also repetitive to a fault and never quite gets anywhere. A friend of mine respectfully but firmly called it "Philip Glass lite."
At nearly 19 minutes, "Arc" progresses from a simple, repeated piano figure in a sustain-pedal-down cloud of sound with voices and strings surfacing occasionally. It's an interesting piece of music, but until a small melodic phrase is introduced at the 14-minute mark, it lacks the forward motion he gives his guitar music that adheres to similar harmonic principles. Ultimately, the blur of the piece can wear a listener out. Still, Blackshaw's musical ideas are interesting enough that it's easy to see his piano pieces progressing as his technique comes along, opening another avenue to explore his musical concepts.
