After another extended break (which has become a trademark), guitarist
Steve Tibbetts returns to
ECM with
Life Of, his eighth album for the label in 36 years. Breaking with his own precedent, this is his second acoustic offering in a row following 2010's
Natural Causes. That said, aside from recording with his 12-string Martin guitar and a piano, and mixing in the concert hall of Macalester College, the two projects have an altogether different feel. The music on the former has a more active, nearly ritualistic feel.
Life Of is more basic, stripped down, and less pronounced. The guitar is a skeletal tone generator, a gateway with a nearly obsessive sense of economy.
Tibbetts is seemingly much more concerned with the music's illustration of its own process than in making a statement. The sound world that exists inside his vintage Martin (or "concert hall," as he describes it) is framed with fingerpicked chords across its almost flat fretboard, bent single-string vibratos, quietly articulated piano playing, and painstakingly edited field recordings from his far Eastern travels. Added to the subtle percussion from
Marc Anderson and occasional cello drones and pedals from
Michelle Kinney, they serve the purpose of drawing the listener into a vast, suggestive, yet blurry world that exists between the physical one and the more nebulous, spiritual body of sound.
Nine of these 12 titles begin with the words "Life Of" -- they were inspired by loved ones, living and departed, as well as anonymous subjects whom
Tibbetts encountered while editing this music on his laptop in a coffee shop. The arresting and brief opening track, "Bloodwork," refers to the extensive diagnostic process he and his sister underwent when he became a donor to (successfully) save her life from cancer. As loaded as its subject matter is to
Tibbetts, however, it reaches the listener ethereally -- it's nearly contemplative, with carefully chosen single piano notes and impeccably chosen guitar phrases. "Life of Mir" commences with cello, washes of reverb, and minor-key, multi-stringed voicings before his 12-string embarks into a slow, unfolding labyrinth that meets shakers, a frame drum, and piano. "Life of Alice" offers serpentine, single-string guitar lines that interact with restrained flamenco-styled chord voicings and piano notes in the instrument's lower-middle register amid natural reverb and muted percussion. "Life of Joan" touches on the same musical terrain as certain pieces on
Natural Causes as the piano lays out more conventional chord changes that
Tibbetts builds on and answers with his guitar. Closers "End Again" and "Start Again" seemingly engage the poles of dissolution and re-creation -- the former in guitar and gamelan drones, spectral sonic fragments, and sparse notes on piano and guitar that act as smoke signals, however impermanent. In the latter, they are more poetic and suggestive, like unfinished thoughts as hollow drums and droning cellos add dimension to
Tibbetts' deeply expressive yet economical and vibrato-rich playing. In sum,
Life Of is a testament to its title with the cycles of becoming and disappearing happening in each moment, which is to say, eternally. ~ Thom Jurek