Low Guitars by Jorge Boehringer

Jorge Boehringer is a musician, artist and thinker originally from the USA but living, working and walking these days in the North-East of England. You might know him as a player of the viola recording and performing under the alias Core of the Coalman, but here he is under his given name playing a suite of (mostly) extended pieces based around six-string short-form bass guitar lines.

And a treat it is too. These low guitar recordings sound sometimes clean and unprocessed (as on opener 'Last Song', a duet with the song of larks going about their business on the coast, in which a fingerpicked guitar figure gets slowly more drawn out over the course of the piece), other times blasted through various effects and coming out the other end in somewhat less recognisable form (as in e.g. the squelching, soaring 17-minute centrepiece 'Seven Plus or Minus Two'). Elsewhere, what initially seems like a couple of minutes of silence at the start of 'Gardening at the Gates of the Dawn' does on closer (louder) inspection reveal itself to be a series of bass harmonics emerging in their own unruffled time and space, eventually spreading out into an ageless field of spatial beauty.