James Blackshaw, The Cloud of Unknowing (2007)

Where bought? 99.9% sure this is Piccadilly Records in Manchester. I was living there then, it is where I met James, it is where the people who got me into his stuff lived, and it is entirely braintape from those days.

The recent years have been quiet on the James Blackshaw front - no new album since 2015, and only one single on Adult Swim, which seems slightly misleading given the music he makes - which I mention as odd because having met and interviewed Blackshaw, seen him play, and heard a few of his records, he seems eminently the kind of lifer artist who will just knock new variants of his basic style out year on year to a devoted following. For a while that was the case, but there was a hiatus that seemed to end a year prior to the lockdown. I hope it hasn't scuppered his desires.

That basic style has been framed as another musician who is approaching the American Primitive style as pioneered by John Fahey and Robbie Basho and those obscure legendary figures of open-tuned cascading acoustic guitar music that draws from folk, country, blues, and modern classical. I'd say that that was somewhat true, but it overlooks the overt ecclesiastical modes and feel of works like this and the 2008 masterpiece The Glass Bead Game (which I really ought to own, frankly).

If anything I sense that Blackshaw has taken a template from another Fahey fan - Jim O'Rourke - and refined the approach of his record Bad Timing, moving into a curiously English-sounding realm; of venerable churches, of pristine verdant downs, of the empty roads in summer, of the lettering above pub doors, of rickety wooden stiles, etc. Take a listen.

I don't dig this record out often as it - through no fault of the record - reminds me of a slightly duff time in my existence. In fact I can pinpoint a particular scene: it is spring and the cat of my friend has gone missing. A week later the cat is found dead in the road, so we decide to bury it on a patch of ground a mile from the house. I have turned up after work in shirt and trousers. It starts to rain. The ground is hard because it is a recently-converted dump - beneath the topsoil is stony and grey. We dig for half an hour, my trousers covered in mud, and only just make a hole big enough for the cat. No one thanks me for my efforts, and I start to realise that most of these people - who were in the scene that Blackshaw came up in, and played gigs with, and promoted shows by - here don't like me very much. I get the train home.

The record sounds great now I'm over all of that: rich and beautiful and consonant, an endless wheel of connecting melodies, prosodic and giving and warm. You should give it a go.