The Hideout, the second in a pair of releases (along with Los Jacintos) of David Daniell's recent live solo guitar performances, was recorded in March 2008 in Daniell's adopted home city of Chicago. A masterfully-built drone engulfs the first portion of the performance. The amount of detail here is staggering; beat patterns emerge within the drone, playing the performance space; spidery lines of guitar fade in and out and ghosts of melodies come and go. The density then subsides to let a rollicking finger-picked acoustic guitar piece emerge. Recalling his Chicago forbears Gastr del Sol as well as Fahey's delta blues mutations, Daniell plays both a precise and rugged version of his soon to be released composition "IV". At the end of the set, we've seen him drive that space train from the Midwest down to the South, time in total suspension for the entire long, strange trip.
David Daniell's live performances over the past few years have quietly but surely gathered an audience of believers. The deftness of execution and power to be found on these complimentary live recordings testifies as to why. Rarely does abstract guitar music sound so lyrical, and rarely does experimental music sound, to put it simply, so pleasing.
Over the past ten years Daniell has been moving closer and closer to his current sound. It was well worth the wait. Combining his mercurial blues-influenced free guitar playing with a sense of classic ambient and electro-acoustic influences we find ourselves in a very unique sound-world. It's John Fahey, Terry Riley and Brian Eno sharing an orbit. In this music the buzz of electric and acoustic strings melts into gaseous clouds of tone; drones constantly shift creating beat patterns; suddenly a finger-picked guitar motif springs to life. Daniell's music is intense and inviting, subverting structures and genres with no sense of pastiche. What we do find is an extremely unique take on minimal American music.
David Daniell is currently exploring one of the most singular paths in abstract guitar playing and experimental composition. These two live documents are an essential glimpse of what Daniell is capable of, as well as pointing the way to his next major recorded work.
