Lost & Found

Album review

Anyone who has been following multi award-winning Scottish guitarist Sean Shibe since his critically acclaimed 2017 debut album, “Dreams and Fancies”, will know pretty much the only thing that we can expect from him is the unexpected, thanks to the chameleon-esque ease with which he slips between musical eras, and acoustic and electric instruments, all wrapped up in the sort of inventive programming that in 2019 won him Gramophone’s first ever “Concept Album of the Year” award for “softLOUD”.

“Lost and Found” is very much in this vein. Conceptually, this is a William Blake-inspired ‘ecstatic journey containing music by outsiders, mystics, visionaries, who often have more than one identity and lay claim to various artistic traditions, genres, or audiences’. Contents-wise, it’s Shibe’s first all-electric album, and sees him reclothe music from 12th-century polymath composer Hildegard von Bingham through to Meredith Monk, Chick Corea, Daniel Kidane and Oliver Leith – the Bingham and Monk heard via Shibe’s own arrangements. Atmospherically meanwhile, it’s very much hitting the ecstatic mystic vibe, dreamily suspending time while simultaneously stroking and challenging the ear. For an additional quirkily creative touch, if you get in quick with buying a physical copy, the first print run comes with an exclusive polaroid of Shibe at the recording sessions.

Now if you’re reading a critic’s thumbs-up into the above description then you’d be right. I’m both pleased and intrigued, for instance, to hear just how successfully Messiaen’s 1937 motet, O Sacrum convivium! translates here into a floating, spacious, quietly ecstatic new creation entirely in tune with its origins as a piece designed to celebrate theological mystery and musically confound the average church congregation.

Then there’s the degree to which the following Venus/Zohreh by British-Iranian composer Shiva Feshareki feels like a natural continuation. Composed in 2018 for the Ligeti Quartet, it represents cosmic journeys through sound via one enormous crescendo in which the vibrations of one string expand into several, the pace apparently quickening as the textures thicken due to those vibrations gradually piling on top of each other; and the taut intensity and perfect control of Shibe’s reading – of what is the world premiere recording of his and Feshareki’s new guitar arrangement – is mesmerising. Then there’s the glassy, silence-imbued wistfulness of Kidane’s two-minute Continuance, written in 2020 for Shibe as a direct response to the lockdown; and the beguiling additional darkness and punch that Shibe’s bass-line rumble lends to Corea’s Children’s Song 4, setting things up nicely for Moondog’s Sea Horse which follows.

It would be a mistake however, to hop just to the tracks I’ve singed out. When this programme is so clearly meant to be experienced as a whole, you’d be losing out if you were to do otherwise. © Charlotte Gardner/Qobuz