Nathan Salsburg

Very nice solo acoustic guitar album from Nathan Salsburg

Nathan Salsburg
Affirmed
No Quarter

Nathan Salsburg makes intricate guitar figures sound uncomplicated and sunny. A veteran of Tompkins Square’s Imaginational AnthemM project, he picks with brio through a septet of front-porch blues originals (and one traditional cover). The notes fly thick and fast, landing with precision and a swaggering bit of swing, yet there is never any sense of hurry. Salsburg, who has worked as an archivist for the Alan Lomax project for more than a decade, and whose Root Hog or Die blog and radio program document historical picking styles, has clearly learned not just the technique but the pace of pre-automobile, pre-internet America. Whether bouncing merrily through buggy-trotting, country-lane evoking “Sought and Affirmed” or taking a more meditative turn in “Eight Belles Dreamed the Devil Was Dead,” Salsburg seems to have all the time in the world.

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"Sought and Hidden"

Avos...guitar duets

The Tompkins Square label does a really fantastic job of finding great acoustic guitar players, whether they are old-school Takoma-style pickers from the 1960s languishing in obscurity or new jack hot shots with fingers in other pots, musically speaking...that is, indie rock and so forth. Their latest effort is the latter kind of phenomenon, offering guitar duets from James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg.

Elkington is best known for his work with the wry, sardonic Zincs, as well as experimental post-Americana outfit the Horse's Ha (with Janet Bean from Freakwater). He also played guitar on Jon Langford's Skull Orchard.

Nathan Salsburg is the traditionalist of the pair, an archivist and producer for the Alan Lomax Archive, curator of the Twos & Fews vernacular-music imprint on Drag City Records, and host of the "Root Hog Or Die" program on East Village Radio. He also played on Imaginational Anthem 3.

The album is mostly traditional picking with some late-Fahey-ish experiments in noise and found sound folded in. The label is offering "The Queue Outside the Night Museum" as a sample, but I can't figure out how to embed it. Go here to listen in.