This is my fav in a series of soundtracked “cloudscapes” by An Imaginal Space (a.k.a. Spook), a vivid, ethereal and shimmering-from-a-mountaintop-at-sunrise ambient guitarist out of Derby, UK. A wonderful presence in all of my social streams, he’s cloaked in a bit of mystery, but I ask no questions and nothing more of him than to continue his lovely (and enviable) prolific output.
via the you tube track description:
I have been creating some timelapses of clouds outside of my work office window and thought I would combine these with some improvised ambient guitar.
His “Sunday Seascapes” series are improvised explorations of elegant refracted guitar lines over sweeping swells of effects, and capture perfect sonic snapshots of the ocean’s eeriness and majesty. My fav of the recent few was from 13 July 2014:
An Imaginal Space duets with a wide range of musicians, and his layered guitar is seamless. Most of the time he’s added his tracks well after the original recordings, but his additions often result in the definitive versions of those tracks, as if his work had been there all along. Case and point is this duet with Dirk Maassen, a world-class ambient pianist:
from the soundcloud track description:
I could not resist adding some ambient guitars to this wonderful piano composition by Dirk Maassen. Please check out more of his beautiful music @ascoltadi
So many wonderful moments from Spook, it is difficult to know how to even do justice to a curation. The moment that hooked me on him for good, however, came earlier this year when this wondrous instrumental cover of Nick Drake’s “Black Eyed Dog” appeared in my soundcloud stream. It left me thinking of what Nick Drake would have done with the ambient and sound-manipulation tools we have today, but it also sent me backwards in time. The airy jazz-inflected drums and fixed rhythm of Spook’s playing recall Bryter Layter, and take the track out of the shadow of other, more well-known Pink Moon-era tracks. In the soundcloud notes, Spook says he feels his cover is “unfinished.” But in a way, this is the best way to leave a tribute to Nick Drake, the most glorious unfinished musician the world’s ever known:
More of An Imaginal Space (Spook):
music.animaginalspace.com
soundcloud.com/an-imaginal-space
twitter.com/animaginalspace