CD (Compact Disc)

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Label: STRANGE ATTRACT

Release date: 19/04/2004

Barcode: 0789856302024

Catalog no.: SAAH0002021

Item ID: 232918

With over two hours of music spread across two discs, 7 Books finds Basho-Junghans stretching way out, mutating the steel string tradition into the most elaborate excursion into sound and composition that has ever fluttered from his fingertips. Basho-Junghans' experimental works are microcosms of his chance discoveries with the acoustic steel string guitar, focusing in on a particular aspect of his epiphanies; 7 Books gathers all of these microcosms into one Big Bang, erupting into a vast universe of subtle and complex sound galaxies. 12-string guitar provides the template for 7 Books, and on Disc One, each "book" (composition) opens and closes with a deep array of chapters and passages. Chiming tones, pulsating percussive runs, finger scrapes and dazzling finger techniques build and build in raga-like fashion. Disc Two focuses on music composed with slide guitar, and Basho-Junghans' particular alien glissandos dance like refracted light, a gloriously disorienting sound broadcast seemingly from a foreign land. Tone, color, timbre, rhythm and space are explored and exposed across the entire expanse of the album, the music comprising a degree of intricacy that compels the listener to fully engage, for attentive listening reveals a host of various sound-worlds. All the more awe-inspiring when you consider that Basho-Junghans, as always, recorded 7 Books in real time, with absolutely no effects, implements or alternate instrumentation used.
Minimalism, Eastern raga, trance-inducing repetition, Spectralist tonal investigations, folk and American fingerstyle steel-string tradition coalesce into one astounding epic for the solo acoustic guitar. Steffen Basho-Junghans follows his instincts above everything else and discovers a myriad of universes within a solitary instrument, inventing a new language in the process. 7 Books is his most aggressive work, a startling mosaic of compositional sound discovery illustrating that the possibilities of an age-old instrument are still being revealed.