Steve Touchton - Guitar Recordings IV

 

Released: February 6 

Despite being a rather short EP, Guitar Recordings IV does manage to touch on a good variety of motifs and different approaches. This is especially interesting as the approach overall is using just guitar with a creative chain of effects. There’s some elements of doom metal and noise, but then there are also compositions that veer much more in the direction of dark ambient. The opening track, “Drifting”  is much in this dark ambient vein though it incorporates a heavy slam of distortion as the soft and long reverberations of the electric guitar ring out. It feels like it’s somewhere in between doom and shoegaze with its overall dark tones. 

The later tracks take a much more noisy approach, most notably the final track “Unanswered.” This track takes an almost purely noise approach feeling a lot more like feedback than anything else. But the overall attitude of the album is one of noisy experimentation, eschewing more structured approaches in favor of a smattering of improvised tones and vague progressions. At the very least, this release is worth the short amount of time it takes to listen to, if for no other reason than the variety of tones Steve is able to squeeze out of his seemingly minimal rig.