Individually, the piano pieces don’t wow like the guitar pieces: “Fix” is pretty, but only pretty. “Arc” is more ambitious; Blackshaw basically nails the sustain pedal to the floor for an eighteen-minute overtone odyssey, simmering with strings and winds. Their titles describe them well: one is static, the other developing. But even though he lacks the subtlety of technique on piano that he possesses so abundantly on guitar, the piano pieces actually improve The Glass Bead Game overall. They serve a crucial function as little ear oases. The appeal of Blackshaw’s playing is how he spikes the broad cascades of ambient music with the corporality of fingers twanging strings. He’s deft enough to pick out prismatic melodic patterns while maintaining rich harmonic drones. But the very relentlessness which defines him, and the broad expanses of his songs, can be enervating if you’re in a frazzled mood, or the wrong needling arpeggio catches your ear. “Arc” and “Fix” are coolly tiled resting points amid the deep, evolving wall-to-wall shag of the guitar pieces.

Another instance of welcome space on The Glass Bead Game is the first half of “Bled,” where a chord progression unfurls in long, regal strides. Blackshaw’s music is always stately, but more seldom is it this austere. That austerity comes to the fore on The Wolf Also Shall Dwell with the Lamb by Brethren of the Free Spirit (named, of course, for a thirteenth- and fourteenth-century antinomian Christian movement), a collaboration between Blackshaw and Jozef van Wissem, a Renaissance-style lutenist from the Netherlands with a scarily mathematical mind. The album is more aloof and white-cube-like than Blackshaw’s solo one, and might trump it for listeners of a more serene disposition.

Every trace of elegant clutter vanishes from “The Sun Tears Itself From the Heavens and Comes Crashing Down Upon the Multitude.” If The Glass Bead Game evokes Philip Glass, this track owes to Brian Eno. Imagine Music for Airports unplugged: chords ring out in a cool void and gently rock to a stop. Having established this field, Blackshaw and van Wissem begin to animate it on the title track, where their gently dueling licks are complexly honeycombed––both spacious and densely structured. If Glass Bead Game is somewhat remote, it sounds positively gregarious next to Brethren of the Free Spirit’s work, in large part because van Wissem’s affinity for melodic palindromes and precise grids of microtonal intervals are expressive in an exceptionally mannered way. “Into the Dust of the Earth” has the dispassionate allure of a relic scrubbed clean by contemporary hands. Both albums are exceedingly fine if you derive pleasure or enchantment from processing the minute mutations of patterns, although Glass Bead Game has the added benefit of spontaneity. Blackshaw’s dreams feel brittle and precious because they’re from so long ago, but he continues to prove their insistence and durability.


_{Image on front page cropped from a photo by Dorthe Winter.  Preview some of the new album on Blackshaw's Myspace page. And also see Blackshaw's page on Young God Records.}