........ Plectrum meets strings, fingers slide across frets and in the resulting alchemy of their interaction a gilded shower of notes is loosed upon the ears. This chain of cause and effect is the regular currency of Andrew Cheshire, a guitarist who possesses the same chameleonic ambiguity that made his feline counterpart famous. Lewis Carroll's creation was a cipher of contrasts, speaking in riddles and leaving behind only a broad toothy grin when the whim visited him. Cheshire enjoys a similar versatility and confidence, moving between styles and moods with a subterfuge akin to smoke and mirrors. But rather than confuse his audience as the cat flummoxed Alice, the guitarist welcomes them warmly into his musical world; a thought-provoking realm of embellishing arpeggios and radiantly articulated chords.
........ Past entries ensconced in the Joule label ledgers depict Cheshire as an artist of startling originality and skill. Able to hold his own with the formidable free improvisers like Dominic Duval and Jay Rosen, but just as easily fitting into the bop-stitched glove favored by associates such as Billy Hart and Ron McClure, his musical methodology is decidedly devoid of pretense or ersatz emotionalism. Choosing a path divergent from past projects, Cheshire eschews the support of a rhythm section on this current excursion and relies solely on his own string-channeled sagacity to carry him through. It's enough, and hearing his individualistic acumen applied to what he himself calls "the most personal thing I've done" leaves an enduring indication of the substantial returns endemic to the endeavor.
........ Prior to the arrival of John Fahey and his alter ego Blind Joe Death, solo guitar albums were something of an anomaly outside the jurisdictions of classical music. Fahey's self-proclaimed place as the father of American Primitive guitar changed that, ushering in a climate of popularity for solo settings on the instrument that still flourishes today. Anyone with a six-string and a tape deck has the means to make a record and many have done so over the years, to the extent where the marketplace is saturated with such product and the continuum of quality is skewed significantly in the direction of the second-rate. Cheshire, cognizant of this trend, embraces the challenge of creating something fresh in a field where few others have been able to break from the mold.
........ As the program's title implies the emphasis throughout these fourteen hand-spun pieces is on ambience leavened with healthy doses of mystery and possibility. The cover art is a calling card for the recital-like flavor favored by the session: a painting showing Cheshire, hollow-body guitar slung over shoulder, sitting alone in a room walled by washes of pastel color. The tracks approximate tone poems ranging from fragments to fully fleshed musings, each one etched cleanly in its allotted sonic space. Together they disperse suite-like, bleeding across temporal boundaries, but just as easily discernable as discrete entities. Overt jazz referents are fleeting much of the time; Cheshire's palette is far too encompassing for single genre markers to contain. The spirit of improvisation hovers heavily like an insulating cloudbank over the session, most notably in the atmosphere of spontaneity that pervades.
........ Cheshire's clarity of enunciation and clever use of repetition feed into the spontaneous surroundings where themes serve as optional signposts to be followed or discarded depending upon the particular path of his peregrinations. Witness his cyclic riffing during the closing seconds of "Drama," where instances of tension and release couch themselves in the overarching lucidity of Cheshire's logical scheme. The transitory "Mysterioso" is another essaying example, where scrupulous pathos is poured into a pint size package weighing in at under a minute. The careful economy of these pieces is likely to draw listener votes for further elaboration. Accepting their place as slices in the larger programmatic pie makes their brevity easier to bear. Longer forays like the sanguine "Beating Heart" the migratory "Journey" leave more room for exposition, but a frugality of purpose, free from needless frillage, also informs their respective durations.
........ Perhaps more important than all the musical minutiae is the lasting impression the program leaves as a whole, lovingly wrapped in one artist's singular sincerity. In this age of carbon-copy commercialism where stacks of discs collect dust on music store shelves this is that rare breed of record that both encourages and remunerates subsequent visitations. Although the first time through Cheshire's facility on the frets is readily apparent, it's the further investigations that reveal the true depth of his designs.

Derek Taylor