There is so much music coming out of Alex de Grassi's guitar that it rises above its new-age label mates. Ripple is not the Grateful Dead track but an achingly lovely tremolo with a rolling baseline. Not surprisingly, the title track is a very relaxed and jazzy composition meant for quiet meditation.
In some ways this is of a piece with other environmental/atmospheric music such as what Windham Hill was so good at producing, and this is clearly meant to be programmatic, but it is saved from being background music by two things: compelling compositions, and remarkable technique. In the midst of the current wave of two-handed-tapping acoustic maestroes, Alex's old school fingerpicking is still off on a planet by itself and still startles me with speed and intricacy: "is that really just one guitar?" My faves, "The Zipper" and "Another Shore".
