The acoustic guitar and the piano are chummy enough in popular recordings, but there’s little concert music written for the duo. Without the magic of compression, how could a mere six or 12 hand-stirred strings, with a little hole to catch the sound, hope to match more than 200 strings pounded by hammers in a big reverberant crate? Steve Gunn and David Moore offer eight lovely answers on Let the Moon Be a Planet, which inaugurates Rvng Intl.’s new “Reflections” series of collaborative albums. It may be too laid-back and vibey to bolster a repertoire, but it blends their respective voices—film-grained fingerstyle for guitarist Gunn; film-score minimalism for pianist Moore—into a tranquil, slow-running elixir.
Let the Moon Be a Planet isn’t exactly a classical record, having more in common with the deconstructed Americana of William Tyler. But it advances the classical guitar expedition Gunn began on 2021’s Other You, trading the steel sting that had defined his playing for the supple shimmer of nylon. A couple of years ago, as he told Guitar World, Gunn got a chance to play an old Gibson Folksinger and felt inspired to buy a six-string Córdoba C5, a classic beginner’s nylon-string model. It appears to be the very guitar he’s holding on the cover of Other You, and it contributed much to that record’s soft L.A. weather. And Moore, whose pellucid tone anchors the ensemble Bing & Ruth, is a classically trained pianist who gets invited to play baby grands on cliffsides and spinets in parabolic glass houses. He clearly cherishes Glass, Eno, and Debussy, though he’s more apt to pay tribute to Ecco the Dolphin, The Simpsons, and American Beauty.
Gunn and Moore first collaborated on Nakama, an EP of collaborative renditions of Other You songs, which led to a series of remote improvised sessions they finished together in upstate New York. The result is Let the Moon Be a Planet, an elaborate and far-out title for a mild and mossy record. It’s generous with bright major keys, undemanding on the ear; Gunn and Moore seem particularly fond of the hopeful sunrise of D. While some songs are atmospherically chorded or tonally furtive—the dry arroyo of “Scattering,” the lunar shadows of “Libration”—high pianism is subordinate to graceful touch and tender feeling.
Moore often dwells on little etudes patched up from simple scales, which you can pick out easily if you have a keyboard handy. Gunn’s close-mic’d chords and rustic ringlets bring more vigor and variety, soaring up and looping back to trace every path in small patches of harmonic terrain. That’s not necessarily a knock against Moore, because what elevates Let the Moon Be a Planet is the edgeless interplay of the voices, not what either is doing on its own. Lead and accompaniment join in a constantly changing ratio as Gunn and Moore hand melodies back and forth with the fluid ease of relay racers, and the pieces proceed in unbroken, radiant streams.
Improvised music often feels like traveling over a long distance, which Let the Moon Be a Planet does on the Music for Airports-like “Basin.” But more of it feels like sitting still and watching the world go by. The more you pay attention to the songs’ structures, the less interesting they seem, and I would have liked to hear the piano put a little more space between this record and “Soft Guitar & Piano Music for Stress Relief” on YouTube. But perhaps the point is more about feeling good than seeming interesting, and at least the piano equivalent of cowboy chords makes sense in the Americana context. Any given moment sounds wonderful, though not much lingers beyond a deep sense of calm.
