L'ARBRE-VERRE

Here's an interesting obscure artist without reviews or even ratings-only. This ½-hour debut album can be found in its entirety from YouTube. DIDIER BONIN is a French musician who plays all instruments on his instrumental albums (with one exception mentioned also in the artist bio). Primarily he is a guitarist, and indeed this calm and dreamy album is rooted on gently played acoustic guitar. As the bio says, he presaged similar approach found a bit later in the New Age genre. This music is pretty relaxating, sure, but it doesn't quite feel appropriate to think of it as New Age music. How about Folk-Ambient? Better.

This album with such beautiful watercolour cover art is divided in three untitled parts, two of them on the first side of the LP. The shortest first track flows in a gentle and mystic way, but around the fifth minute there's sudden surprise moment where also the percussion gets louder -- for a very short while. From the guitar sounds the listener can sense a diverse variety of possible influences. Sometimes the music reminds me of early MIKE OLDFIELD (although it's much calmer than Hergest Ridge for instance), JADE WARRIOR and ANTHONY PHILLIPS. The acoustic guitar playing is actually often reminiscent of CROSBY, STILLS & NASH and that kind of folk rock stuff, if you imagine them without proper vocals. And yet the compositions here are much more free-flowing and abstract, compared to the song- oriented approach -- that one can, on the other hand, imagine for example during the second track.

Track No. 3 (13:40) on the second vinyl side can be hailed as the most progressive with its harmonic variations on the texture and tempo, but the tailor-made term Folk-Ambient is never inappropriate. Occasionally I'm also thinking of the album Apollo by Brian Eno, Roger Eno & Daniel Lanois. It would be tempting to give a good (four-star) rating for this obscurity, but perhaps in the end it falls short of dynamics and stronger musical ideas. 3½ stars rounded down for that.