Straying from the niche where he made his name, the fingerstyle guitarist layers his playing with field recordings and electroacoustic techniques, to cryptic but compelling ends.
Daniel Bachman made his name as a guitar prodigy when he was still in his twenties, and his early run of releases—first under the name Sacred Harp, and then under his birth name—anointed him as a worthy scion to the greats of fingerstyle guitar. Records like 2012’s Seven Pines showcased a reflective, sophisticated style with an ear for tradition. But perhaps Bachman realized that time would turn this comfortable niche into a trap. More recently, the Charlottesville musician has quietly broken off from the pack of earnest guitar players paying homage to the music of Fahey, Basho, et al. and wandered off down his own path.
A sprawling double LP, Axacan features Bachman’s virtuoso playing, but plenty of other things besides. Across its 73 minutes, we hear thunderstorms, insects, ocean waves, snatches of radio broadcasts, and towards the end of a track called “Blues in the Anthropocene,” the sound of rusty metal tools being hurled into a dumpster. The record takes its name from a 16th-century colony founded by Spaniards around the Chesapeake Bay, an area that today is Bachman’s home state, Virginia. But the colony would be short-lived; the settlers were abandoned by their guides and left to perish. The album’s cover depicts an untouched area of forest, wreathed in cloud. It suits the music. In places, Axacan feels less like a conventional musical recording than an ungoverned wilderness into which the world creeps unbidden.
Bachman took a turn into experimental territory on 2019’s The Morning Star, an album that interspersed his guitar work with drones, field recordings, and ambient techniques. Axacan marks a step further into this terrain. An accompanying essay written by Bachman’s friend James Toth, the guitarist and writer, notes that the record draws influence from electroacoustic music—a mid-century style espoused by composers such as Pierre Schaeffer and Edgard Varèse, who used magnetic tape and rudimentary electronics to explore new ideas in texture and tone. Often this manifests in a way that feels fresh and surprising. “Big Summer” is a short guitar piece that sounds as if it was captured on a damaged tape machine. As Bachman’s fingers slide up and down the frets, you wonder if you’re listening to the bend of strings or the wobble of an analog recording—a neat audio illusion that fades while your ears are still trying to catch up.
Bachman’s guitar playing has become increasingly distinctive over the years. Lonesome and elemental in tone, it has a prickly beauty, gritty like dirt and sharp like pine needles. There is a spaciousness to his style that demands your attention. “Coronach” demonstrates an almost magical command of pacing; over nine minutes, it moves between passages of thrashing motion, eddying calm, and near silence, as if carried along on the breeze. “Year of the Rat” starts with a sparklingly pretty steel-string motif that recedes into silence; then it pauses, you hear Bachman clear his nose, and it begins again. This vérité approach brings to mind the distant roots of American folk music—the songs collected in situ by figures like Alan Lomax, which captured not just the players, but something of the spirit of the rugged places they called home.
What might be most surprising about Axacan is the proportion of its running time in which Bachman’s guitar is altogether absent. Segments of the record appear to be straight field recordings. “Deep Adaptation” is a mysterious soundscape of watery lumps and bumps; “WBRP 47.5” mixes up environmental sounds with a leisurely spin of an analog radio dial. And then there is “Blue Ocean 0.” A drone piece filling a full side of vinyl, it melds lapping waves and birdsong with harmonium and fiddle. It’s neatly done, building gradually to blazing intensity before sinking slowly beneath the water. But strung out to 17 minutes, its sheer scale leaves the album feeling a little lopsided.
There is a sense of weight to Axacan that makes it feel like a spiritual, private endeavor. The field recordings have almost diaristic overtones, as if articulating matters of deep personal significance. Track titles like “Blues in the Anthropocene” and “Deep Adaptation” indicate an environmental consciousness, even as they suggest a sort of cynical realism about the state we are in. Folk music is in its bones a referential music, but there isn’t a single hokey melody or clichéd turn here; Bachman has ruthlessly whittled any sense of sentimentality from his music, and it’s an approach that undoubtedly distinguishes him from his peers. But this record does not reveal its secrets easily, and sometimes feels as if it wants to hold you at arm’s length. It’s easy to admire Axacan’s musicianship, easier still to admire its ambition—even as the spirit of enigma laced throughout this record leaves it dangling just a little out of reach.
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