Daniel Bachman :: “Moving Through Light”
Northern Virginia-based multi-instrumentalist Daniel Bachman is an artist, historian, activist, farmer, and all-around powerhouse for world peace. With no further introduction necessary, Bachman’s alchemical abilities and ritualistic range from finger-style guitar, blistering banjo, lap-steel legitimacy, and expertise in experimental expression transcend his harmonious heroes such as Robbie Basho, John Fahey, and Jack Rose while still paying poetic homage to their influence and constant conscious. Growing up around the Rappahannock River in Fredericksburg, Bachman, along with his sister Sarah Anne Bachman, sought refuge in music and its sometimes harsh history, but what they found was based on miracles, precious poetics, and keeping your faith in the human spirit as outside forces grow stronger, and near. Enriched in a narrative of longing and desperation for an end to the madness we’ve all endured these last years, Bachman’s most recent effort entitled “Moving Through Light” is a melodic manifesto into the sophistication of the imagination that is more cinematic than anything else. Independently surfing the silver surfaces of space and time while occupying history in all its rich and rare reflections, Bachman teleports his listeners into the ethereal matrix where lysergic layers of looping lunacy capture the flickering eyes and ears of anyone eager to enter its exotic enchantment. When he’s not turning over ancient stones to reveal the true mystery of the past that effortlessly echoes through the mountains of his beloved home of Virginia, the dedicated disciple of the ultimate process and meditation of madness can be found with his green thumb on the poetic pulse of America’s dilapidated Days of Future Passed with great force as we ride the sickening swells of the times.
“It may not sound like it, but my new record, Moving Through Light, is a solo fingerstyle guitar record. In fact, all the sounds on this record came from one guitar, with their many voices stretched, bent, processed, and superimposed over the top of one another, sometimes hundreds and hundreds of times. The only other sound you’ll hear throughout this 1-hour 14-minute album is the occasional drum machine sample, all recorded off of an app I have on my phone. To be honest, this is a record that I’ve been wanting to make for some time now. When I started getting into this sound collage style a couple of years ago, I immediately thought, “Wow, it’d be pretty cool to do a whole record of guitar music but edited like this.” So, in the spring of 2024, I had a little time in between some time-sensitive projects and I slowly began piecing it all together, little by little, eventually growing it into this double record length album of collage guitar music, and I couldn’t be happier with how it all turned out. There are a couple of different styles on this one, from really dense tangles of screaming tones and drones, rapidly looping and falling in on themselves, to very minimal solo guitar pieces that have received the collage treatment and time-intensive editing process, all created to be woven together into one seamless listen. If I’m being honest, this is the music I’m most excited about making right now, and kind of feels like the next step forward for me, merging the fingerstyle techniques I’ve learned over the last 20-some years as a player, trying to pull out a new possibility. My sincere appreciation to everyone who picks this one up, thanks for listening!”
Across the album’s sweating palm of crystal-clear contemplation and rivers of rhythms rests this lurking figure who carefully casts signals into the cosmic creek of clarity. With tracks such as the marvelous 11-minute raga “Fall into/out to,” “The Sun (Bending Through The Glass),” “Cast Layered Likeness Of Life (Some Trees And Heat, But Mostly Shadows…),” and the album’s epic mid-way point “A Place You Never Knew To Remember” bridging the distance-less gap between thought and reality, Bachman proves the impossible by someone who is expected to carry the torch of heavy hypnosis in the world of finger-style guitar but instead obliterates those widespread opinions by doing exactly what he wants. “It may not sound like it, but my new record, Moving Through Light, is a solo fingerstyle guitar record,” says Bachman about the tonal teachings of “Moving Through Light.” With breathing tantric in tone, temptation into the unknown, and a fundamental fascination for writing and recording music, Bachman’s cosmic complexities help simplify what he’s trying to get across by demonstrating the radical relationship between the mind, body, politics, and connection to the land. A fully functioning ecosystem of experimental expression, Bachman has done it again.
