Airs (studio album) by Loren Mazzacane Connors

From Skinny 06/03/2014 21:35

Slight, poetic, improvised solo guitar pieces, each of which has its own feel and yet fits perfectly into the wider suite. It retains some semblance of blues and folk music throughout, but never really sounds like either. It has the same lucid, intangible quality that makes Selected Ambient Works vol. 2 one of my favourite records, but it doesn't try to be as consciously abstract as that record. This is just the sound of a person who has mastered their instrument, and can pull from it sounds that have this old-world familiarity and at the same are like very little else I've heard. It just feels so pure, so utterly detached from the immediacy of modern life, and somehow still indelibly linked to our society, with its use of nothing but the one instrument that more than any other epitomises post-War Western society, the electric guitar. It conveys that strange sense of being dragged around unwittingly yet voluntarily in those necessary if meaningless circles that make up our daily routes and routines - not to mention displays the same crystalline, economic beauty drawn from the mundanity/absurdity of everyday life - that I get from reading Paul Auster's City of Glass. If all of this is making the album sound terribly pretentious, I apologise. It's just me who's pretentious. This album is stunning.