EXPERIMENTAL
BY JOHN MULVEY
Daniel Bachman
★★★★
Moving Through Light
BANDCAMP. DL
Virginian collagist reconciles with his guitar.
For the past few years, Bachman has often seemed to be on the run from his past as a virtuoso guitarist. Axacan (2021) and Almanac Behind (2022) were complex, brilliant, politically-charged pieces of sound art, using field recordings and radical processing to interrogate his region’s history and articulate the enormity of climate crisis. 2023’s When The Roses Come Again, meanwhile, ditched guitars entirely for home-built instruments. Moving Through Light, however, feels like a rapprochement with his guitar – albeit on bold new terms. Here, fragments of his playing are chopped and screwed into an elaborate sound collage that can be thorny, disorienting, but also – start with The Sun (Bending Through The Glass) – overwhelmingly beautiful. References? It’s a stretch, but imagine an Appalachian Derek Bailey remixed in glitchy, Mego label style.