Virginia-based guitarist, environmentalist, archivist and sound artist Daniel Bachman’s first release since striking out as a totally independent musician sees him return to the bosom of the acoustic guitar, albeit through the lens of his more recent sound collage style. For Moving through Light, Daniel feeds a wealth of material played on one acoustic guitar through a phone app, layering the sounds sometimes hundreds of times to build a seventy-five-minute soundscape that veers from digital-sounding drones and white noise to delicately picked guitar strings.
So, those expecting an album of old-school Daniel Bachman will have to shift their thinking and open their minds to a really quite remarkable recording that must have taken a huge amount of time to build and polish. Although the album is sliced into fifteen tracks, it plays as a whole listening experience that would be ideally suited to a long journey, and Daniel ensures that each track name also links to the next, building a poetic setlist appropriate to the music.
And what music it is, it is difficult to pin down tracks as examples with such a shifting, strangely organic structure. The sound of the guitar is unrecognisable in places, but then will suddenly breach the surface. Take Your Steps (tumbling throughout every chamber), a quite slow-moving and ethereal piece, with sounds of hissing and digitally manipulated beeps interspersed with shimmering guitar notes. It’s delicately done and sounds great.
Elsewhere, A place you never knew to remember brings the guitar further forward, with loose, sparse notes fidgeting over a subtly shifting and building digital mist. This leads into The sun (bending through glass), one of the more conventionally guitar-focused parts of the album and a very pretty piece of playing, with two main parts working in harmony with themselves and a calming drone effect. This is a beautiful piece, with an Eastern flavour and an absolutely spot-on title that the guitar harmonics evoke so well.
Cast layered likeness of life (some trees and heat, but mostly shadows…) is more serious, bringing to mind Big Ocean 0 from Axacan, although truncated to less than five minutes. Here the drum app keeps time with dense but somehow quite light layers of noise, conjuring a suggestion of unease still yet to materialise.
As I said, it’s difficult to cherry-pick parts of this record, as it works so well as an ebbing and flowing whole, so let’s jump to the very end and God is Change. The guitar is again at the forefront here, but there is a whole lot happening behind it, with strange strums, fret slides and repeated notes trying to disrupt a sweet noodle at the core. The various buzzing strings and audible guitar techniques are fun to hear on this one, and it’s a great example of the collage method working with the space around it, providing brighter moments comparable to parts like The sun (bending through glass) and While you gaze. Absolutely mesmerising.
Although Moving through Light pretty much turns the guitar soli genre inside out and flips it multiple times, it can still be considered a dynamic take on the solo acoustic album, as well as a piece of sound collage that uses the instrument as its primary tool. Interpretations and opinions will be plenty after people hear this recording, but what is clear is that it is a startlingly beautiful, challenging, painstaking piece of work from an artist who continues to push boundaries and create the work that means the most to him. I urge you to live with this one for a while and let it work its magic.
Moving Through Light (28th February 2025) Self Released
Bandcamp: https://danielbachman.bandcamp.com/album/moving-through-light