Modern technology has presented a lot of new sonic possibilities, even for the grassroots, jobbing musician. A guitar is no longer just a guitar, a voice more than a voice and I recall seeing Adam Scott Glasspool demonstrating this concept live in a small venue as banks of affected guitar sound washed around him, resonant and otherworldly, sweeping and cinematic and yet all resulting from one man, six strings and a broad minded approach.
It’s an approach he continues to explore on his latest e.p. Any Joy. Whilst In The Shade of the Trees offers a fairly expected take on the chilled, ambient acoustic experience, shimmering guitars embellished by some intriguing haunting background noises and a lilting melody centre stage elsewhere he is less conventional.
Arkansas is a wonderfully chiming instrumental, part classical oriental, part BBC Radiophonic Workshop, intriguing in its lack of urgency and its ability to use notes to merely create bubbles around existing natural atmospherics and let both nature and the listener fill in the rest.
Even the slightly more substantial tracks which bookend the e.p. This Can Be and Where I Am Unknown seem the product of drifting, primal sounds, distant echoes of the birth of the universe and disembodied vocals rather than the usual musical building blocks.
It is music that seems in turn the product of a human composer, the mournful sounds from deep within a dying computer and transient, elemental sounds of the natural world. It is at once ancient and futuristic, timeless and outside of time itself. I guess the greatest complement you can give any original songwriter is that you can’t pin down exactly where their music fits into the scheme of things. And here that is an understatement, to say the least.
Pre-order Any Joy (and all previous releases)Â HERE
