RECENT LISTENING #12

Sandy Ewen, Cindy, Peter Jefferies & Jono Lonie, Georgia Ann Muldrow As: Jyoti, Jo Johnson, Van Halen, Velvet Underground, M.S.B.R.

SANDY EWEN You Win LP (GILGONGO) Pretty staggering solo guitar LP from 2020, in the ‘low heavy abstractions’ subgenre that I just made up a name for, by a guitarist I know (barely) from her band The Weird Weeds (heard one CDR release back in 2004, thought it was excellent). I keep trying to come up with metaphors to describe the headspace this solo guitar music puts me into (the front cover shimmer of sunlight on dark water, the slow growth of green lichen on grey stone, the stone itself that was forged over eons and broken off the side of a mountain thousands of years ago, tumbling to an eventual resting spot somewhere under the canopy of an Arctic forest), but ultimately none of them fully capture Ewen’s style and approach. So then I try comparing it to another mind-blowing solo guitar LP, Little Treatise on Morals by Donald Miller, because both feature heavy electric guitar sound played and processed in an extremely abstract and surprisingly calm way, but the more I do that, the m…