Those familiar with Sir Richard Bishop's 36-year career spanning Sun City Girls, solo excursions and Rangda (in cahoots with Ben Chasny and Chris Corsano) will welcome this gathering of seven extemporary compositions, recorded in a rooftop apartment while the American guitarist was visiting the Moroccan city to perform a concert.
Tangier is an extraordinarily intimate confection, a document of an improv virtuoso tracking each and every memory within the wood of a 19th-century guitar that called to him like a lorelei from a luthier's shop while Bishop was living in Geneva.
Instinct, fluency, fearlessness: Tangier braises these elements to the point of unctuous, Middle Eastern-hued beauty, leaving room for contrasting flavours in the jiitery, borderline math-rock of Safe House and the baroque romance of the closing Let It Come Down.
Tangier was recorded after sundown and the cool plaster and tiles of the recording location provide a silent but palpable accompanist to Bishop's twangs, thrums and flourishes, which hark back to the late John Fahey as well as sideways to contemporaries such as RM Hubbert and James Blackshaw (albeit the latter on amphetamines).
All told, this is as enchanting a solo acoustic guitar record as you're likely to hear this year, and proof that travel broadens the mind - in more ways than one.
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