
Glenn Kimpton is a Bristol-based guitarist who creates acoustic pieces of a unique and beguiling character. While his work draws heavily from first and second-wave American primitivists (Robbie Basho and William Tyler seem to be particular influences), there is a whole lot more going on besides. A wind-blown kind of pastoralia, like a chillier English take on the west-coast psych-folk of Six Organs Of Admittance, pervades these improvisations. And like Ben Chasny or a folkier Bill Orcutt, he is keen to use unconventional techniques and tunings to tease out sounds (and emotional resonances) not usually associated with the acoustic guitar.
Kimpton’s work tends to be long-form. Its various shifts – like in Eno’s ambient works – can’t always be fully discerned in the instant of listening, but taken together form a surprisingly varied sound palette. 2021’s He Thinks I Am The Wisest Man consists of two twelve-plus minute improvisations that showcased his rare combination of adroit fingerpicking and almost visual sense of timing and drama. All of this was recorded outside, with the city’s traffic providing a constant background drone which gave the whole thing a slightly eerie grey wash.
Serious Glimmers is slightly different, both in structure and in feel. Again it focuses on improvised acoustic guitar, but this time one single piece is split into six sections, each with its own distinct musical personality so that it feels both more self-contained and less inhibited than its predecessor. The first section, which gives the album its title, begins with broad, expressionistic strokes, progressing stealthily and with admirable restraint before bubbling over into something like exuberance at its halfway point. The long second part, Pointless Body, offers a similar trajectory but has a stranger, wilder feel. Notes bend, phrases sweep upwards, the guitar’s incidental scrapes and squeaks become part of the musical landscape. You can almost hear the ideas forming, rising to the surface, being discarded or developed as Kimpton sees fit. Everything here is wonderfully in the moment.
A shorter section, Ennui, is fidgety and percussive and leads into a longer passage of reflection. Kimpton is heavily inspired by the natural world, and the slower pace of Gin Trap and Stitch Up seem to reflect a hushed, riparian landscape. The cycle’s final five minutes provide some of its most beautiful and experimental moments, the guitar attaining a chiming clarity even as it is urged into weirder and more fascinating territories.
It is a good time for solo acoustic guitar, and many of its finest practitioners are UK-based. Kimpton’s work sits easily alongside artists like C. Joynes or Gwenifer Raymond (who occupy the stranger and more imaginative end of the spectrum), and he is never afraid to veer away from the folk idiom often associated with the genre and navigate the more complex waters of experimentalism and improvisation. Often complex and always highly rewarding, Serious Glimmers is the perfect introduction to his art.