All Is Falling

James Blackshaw, despite recording with an electric guitar for the first time, seems to be in a mood more of defeat or retreat than of newfound inspiration on All Is Falling. It isn't that electricity fails to offer Blackshaw any notable or distinguishing characteristics. The tones of his 12-string are thicker, richer, and more reverberant than on prior recordings. The electric guitar creates some intriguing textural depth — even when settling into his standard, infinitely circling niche — and allows Blackshaw to experiment with dissonance in ways previously impossible with his cadre of acoustic equipment. Although the introduction of electric guitar accounts for several deviations from Blackshaw's established milieu, it does not help make All Is Falling feel particularly 'electric,' so to speak.

With the tragic passing of Jack Rose last year, virtuoso guitar playing lost one of its most forthright proponents. Rose carried the flame left by John Fahey - the sense of the power and importance of early blues and folk - the ‘American primitive’ sound that Fahey and his cohorts perfected so eloquently. And yet perhaps the ‘new folk’ scene was itself already at a crossroads – from the peak of its popularity around 2004/05 its main protagonists have all been carried in different directions. Rose was in the process of delving even further into the roots of the music he loved, recording his own versions of ragtime songs from the Twenties, whilst Ben Chasny (a.k.a. Six Organs of Admittance) had moved into darker and dronier territory since his most concentrated acoustic records – 2003’s masterful For Octavio Paz and 2005’s School Of The Flower.

For a while, categorising James Blackshaw did not pose much of a challenge. An outstanding 12-string guitarist in the lineage of the Takoma school, his mesmerising circular patterns were reminiscent of Robbie Basho or John Fahey. These reference points are now proving inadequate as Blackshaw continues to diversify. On Litany Of Echoes and The Glass Bead Game, Blackshaw occasionally veered away from the guitar altogether, performing on the piano in a less proficient but no less haunting style. His collaboration with the Dutch lute player Josef Van Wissem suggested an interest in baroque instruments and forms.

A hypnic jerk is that feeling you get when you’re sleeping—when, just as you’re drifting off to sleep, you suddenly feel like you’re falling, and your body jolts you awake. But if, as James Blackshaw insists with the title of his new album, All Is Falling, then there’s no place to jolt, nothing to bump up against, nothing to jar you out of that feeling. You’re just stuck floating in the middle, which is right where Blackshaw loves to put us. His music is both earth-sturdy and somehow ephemeral, and, on his new record, that in-between world he creates—equal parts fever dream and controlled storm—has grown to his subtly biggest sound.

James Blackshaw isn't even 30 years old yet, but he's built himself, through a combination of otherworldly instrumental skill on the guitar and a highly developed sensibility for modern composition, into a renowned figure in the space between folk, classical music, minimalism, and experimentalism. It's tempting to think of him as a guitarist, mostly because he has such amazing command of that instrument, but he really is more than that. It's quite as simple as saying he's also a pianist, though, because while he plays that instrument I tend not to think of him as a pianist so much as a composer who plays piano to achieve his goals.