Through A Room (LP)

"Bill Nace's 'Through a Room' represents a seismic progression from 'Both', his startling 2020 debut solo LP for Drag City. Nace's career has been defined by a relentless probing of ways to frame the complex menu of human emotions, and that the guitar has been his primary tool for exploring this terrain is of little consequence.

On this new release, he also employs tapes, hurdy gurdy, doughnut pipe, quelle est belle, as well as his latest instrument of choice, taishōgoto. This is also, ultimately, insignificant. What matters is the discerning spirit which animates his work. The tracks are carefully built from loops and phrases that talk to each other, subsume one another, overlapping and crashing and diving and expanding and emerging into unimagined vistas.

On the whole, the record offers a fascinating and engrossing chronicle - a sequence of interrelated stories told by a temporally dislodged narrator. You think you're here, then you're there, and then you go through trapdoors and along tunnels, into cellars and secret rooms, and you find that actually you're back where you started. But it's not hard to follow. Nothing this enticing can be hard to follow.