Rachika Nayar‘s follow up to the recent Our Hands Against The Dusk is a gorgeous little series of bedroom snippets, a dozen flights of guitar fancy that trade chiming circular motifs against delicate picking, with the odd churn of lower register adding a touch of melancholy here and there.
Those circular motifs are so pretty, though, that the tone rings purely and they swoop around your head like so many birds against a blue sky. The tracks follow similar paths, but their brevity means that nothing stays too long and if anything, you find yourself grasping for them as they vanish in a flash. The dexterity of the playing is quite impressive, but her willingness to just bring a piece to a halt after thirty seconds and head off with another idea is pretty brave and gives a good impression of her confidence.
All the pieces were recorded at home with everything looped and layered to produce these outstanding vignettes. There is a warmth and joy to the playing that finds the guitars ringing like bells, but the repetition is the kind of thing that draws the listener in and you find yourself poking around in the background, picking up the little details. The precision of the playing owes something to the likes of American football, that desire to weave intricate patterns like aural rabbit holes, but without that feeling that you can at times be overwhelmed. Some of the guitar lines shimmer like a heat haze and here the sound is less precise with the reverb and the layers producing a blurry, distant effect.Some pieces move slower, and that allows the notes to alight near you like exotic birds that you can’t quite touch but really want to. To be honest, the length of the pieces and their abrupt endings find you grasping in the air like trying to catch smoke; but as you sit back, something else appears and takes you away in another direction. The guitar may sound like a banjo in places, or have a baby Godspeed-like zing elsewhere. The different moods move across the album and with touches of backwards looping and textural experimentation, it is chock full of ideas that clearly pass through Rachika’s mind like little dreams.
Hopefully these diminutive delights will be fleshed out for a full-length album some time soon; but for now, this is a real treat for lovers of textural guitar precision that exudes good times and joy.-Mr Olivetti-
