Yes, it does look like it’s that time of the year again. When the dog days of summer fade into the early turn of fall, I tend to tune into music that falls in between seasons and moods. And I can’t help but to think that it’s actually my favorite kind of music. From Shinsuke Honda to Steve Hiett or Riccardo Giagni to Randy Honea, it seems there is an actual shared vibration flowing through all these ideas. And now, I’d like to do my best to introduce another entry into this world of like-minded musicos: Anton Kirkpatrick’s Reel Of Ghosts And Dreams.
Truth be told there is precious little information one can find about Anton anywhere in our current world. A native Scot from Glasgow, Anton was just 24 years old when he recorded this, his sophomore release. As stated in the liner notes to this record, Anton was a gifted guitarist who lent his highly technical prowess to various traditional folk groups like Capercaillie who likewise were trying to chart a new course for their kind of music in the New Wave era.
Where Anton made his mark was through his various solo performances. Influenced by modern European jazz but still in touch/liege with the traditional Celtic music, somehow he used various early looping/echo effects combined with electroacoustic instruments to create his kind of atmospheric music.
It appears that on his 1985 debut, Exotique Journal, one can surmise even he was trying to figure out how to make all those connections in his head. Using one guitar to connect the rhythms of Africa, the spaceful melodies of Asia, the improvisatory spirit of jazz and newfound guitar technology, would be a pretentious exercise in virtuosity, if he didn’t imprint his own being in this music.
Three years later, on his sophomore release, it appears a special touchstone was planted. Distributed by an English progressive folk label, Making Waves from North Yorkshire, best known for issuing whatever fresh, new passable releases were there for Clannad and The Albion Band, now he appeared to have a long runway to create the kind of studio music he was capable of creating, one as far from his original heroes (yet imbibing a lot of their original spirit).
Anton would take advantage of a fortuitous sponsorship by the giant Roland instrument company to use some of their most advanced guitar synthesizer technology. Using the Roland GR-707 guitar controller and GR-700 synth pedal would allow Anton to augment his complex, harmonic solo acoustic guitar playing with equally multi-layered electronic accompaniment.
What’s fascinating about 1988’s Reel Of Ghosts And Dreams is how Anton finds unique ways to connect the seemingly disparate styles of Celtic folk, continental, European jazz, and rudderless ambient music, in a direction that seemed pointedtly fixated on the Atlantic. The cover might clue you in.
A collage of Gaelic archetype, old European religiosity, and aquatic, cavernous design, in its Picasso-esque rubric the cover of Reel Of Ghosts And Dreams tried to paint Anton, the guitar man, as lost in the strings of his guitar, traveling the slipstream of tradition and modernity. On songs like the opener, “Followed By Rain”, we hear that push and pull, using his wonderfully elegiac melodies to paint some kind of tonal chiaroscuro where minimal electronic background synths seem to haunt the storytelling melodicism of his 6-string instrument.
The album plays as the best one-person albums can play. Lean, muscular New Age jazz like “You Pout I Pout Too” sets a chill tempo, one that sounds forlorn and midtempo. “Empty Houses”, a concise open-tuned acoustic instrumental gives you a touch of his roving beginnings. Then “Heart Of Bamboo” signals what’s new in the world. Seemingly played all on guitar, glowing, indescribable atmospheric synths and sampled shakuhachi float like little clouds on little hills, where Anton’s sun-dappled Takamine classical guitars can shorn in and out, making this track a gorgeous highlight to a pleasant album that seems more than just that.
Playing out for less than 40 minutes, Reel Of Ghosts And Dreams will go on to feature more tracks that go deeper through some kind of hazy nostalgia. “Slender Dancing” will feature the cosmopolitan nocturnal dance moods once heard in the far flung grooves of musicians from the other side of the Atlantic like Steve Beresford. All of them seemingly playing to a Mediterranean sound that perhaps never existed, but was willed forward through sundowning music (much like this one) looking for its own “golden hour”, creating a scene in one’s own dream…even if it’s just for a brief moment.
For now, as history once again forces me to stop here, here’s hoping this gorgeous, breezy music finds one more yard to float down to. And Anton himself can step forward to relate where it came from.
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