The architects of modern fingerstyle guitar built their temple with steel. Sure, you have your Bola Setes, your Tashi Dorjis, the odd occasion Six Organs of Admittance would reach for a nylon-string; but the vast majority of fingerpickers walking in John Fahey’s footsteps seem to have felt similarly as Robbie Basho, who once claimed that while the classical guitar may be fit for more romantic songs, steel-strings had the “fire.” Mason Lindahl, however, would beg to differ: He plays his classical guitar as if he were blowing out the final embers of some cave-dwelling flame, then tracing the smoke as it dances through the air. His music is stark yet warm, swirling yet still, violent yet hauntingly gentle.
Lindahl has remained an elusive figure in the instrumental guitar world, sometimes waiting a decade and change between releases (from the scant interviews he’s done, one gets the sense that he doesn’t want to bother releasing music unless he can get it just right). The last we heard from him was 2021’s lovely Kissing Rosy in the Rain, the first album on which he fully dropped the vocals and let his guitar speak for itself. His latest release plumbs the mysterious depths of his instrument even deeper. Recorded between Marin County, California, and just outside Reykjavík, Joshua / Same Day Walking was initially conceived as two separate albums, but arrive collected as one unified, hour-long release. It’s the right way to listen to them—each session has its own subtle character, but together they capture the complexity and malleability of his brusque, searching style as it climbs to an aching new high.
Though the nylon-string guitar is typically deployed for its softer qualities, Lindahl tackles it with maelstrom force, attacking his strings right at the base of the bridge, where they’re at their most taut. Lindahl shrouds himself in textures both up close and physical: On “Joshua Underwater,” he twists and hammers his strings as if he were bending the neck of the guitar itself, while the low, winding melody of “Little Sister” is constantly interrupted by the sounds of strings snapping against the body, frustratedly resisting his plucks. Creaking, moaning wood ensnares these tracks, but there are whispers of other instruments around the margins, namely a soft glow of organ and a synthesizer that seems to be constantly decaying in the background, withering like snakeskin. “Same Day Walking” weaves these sounds directly into Lindahl’s playing, his tense strums ringing out to leave room for uncanny hanging artifacts of reverb, bringing their artificiality into the performance itself.
Where fingerstyle guitarists often tend to pull from a shared language of folk music and ragtime, Lindahl’s playing is closer to a pitch-black reimagining of bolero and flamenco. His spidery melodies swerve up, around, and backwards, tumbling in and out of meter as he hunts his way to his next chord. “Long Prowl, Underwater” closes out the first of the two albums with a delirium of bent notes that shimmer like reflected moonlight; you can instantly hear the difference in tone when “Anticipation of the Passed Baton” commences the second of the two recording sessions, as Lindahl leaves much more room for the empty space surrounding his muted strings. It’s a delicate snowfall compared to the first album’s snaking predator, though quietly menacing tracks like “Moon Over” hint at a simmering darkness lurking just beyond the frame.
It’s rare these days to hear an artist pushing fingerstyle guitar—a style inherently boxed in not only by its instrumental limitations, but also its tendency toward traditionalism—in visceral new directions. Lindahl’s approach operates somewhere parallel to Raphael Rogiński’s splintering jazz covers and Bill Orcutt’s tortured blues, but steeped in a cosmic, melancholy dread that’s fully his own. Present day torchbearer Hayden Pedigo has cited Lindahl as his favorite player; if Pedigo has shepherded American Primitive music to a more gentle and accessible place in recent years, here Lindahl is continuing to push it to its darkest, mistiest orbits, a doomed ferry ride into the dusk.
