Review

William DeLee lives in Portland OR, and he plays acoustic guitars and associated instruments without resort to picks, effects or amplification. But even though he lives in the last state that John Fahey called home, he stakes his territory at a sizable distance from Takoma style guitar. His technique is too clean, his Andean lilt too pronounced. “Rueli,” on which he plays a 10-string lute called a ronroco, is like blown glass, simultaneously hard, fragile, and very light. And while “Woven,” which is played on a nylon-stringed Spanish guitar, keeps the listener on the edge of their seat throughout, it doesn’t tell a story. This music isn’t about something, it simply is, changing the atmosphere with its involved and unfixed melodies and surreptitiously captured (while the playing is precise, sometimes the recoding is rough) peregrinations.