James Blackshaw – Unraveling In Your Hands

It’s been nine long years since English guitarist James Blackshaw released his last album, Summoning Suns. Up until that point, he’d been churning out music with almost alarming frequency, and between 2003 and 2015, he averaged at least an album a year, a gorgeous run of music that shifted from intimate guitar soli ritual to expansive, galaxy-swallowing, epic compositions. Not to mention collaborations with similarly quixotic artists like Pantaleimon and Lubomyr Melnyk, and appearances on albums by Current 93, Myrninerest, Peter Wright and Michael Gira.

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But everything went quiet after Summoning Suns. As it turns out, Blackshaw was tiring of the long haul that was making a living through music; it was never the most secure and predictable of careers to start with. He started cooking professionally, eventually opening a Japanese pop-up restaurant, Sumisu Ramen, in Hastings, with his wife; this after a run of kitchen jobs, one of which led him near to mental breakdown. Then, in 2022, he lost his dog Dexter to liver disease, and his close collaborator John Hannon (dedicatee of this new album) passed away. He also broke his right shoulder after slipping on black ice.

It’s fair to say it’s been a rough run for Blackshaw. This made the sudden appearance of a new recording, “Why Keep Still?”, on Bandcamp in mid-2023 cause for celebration, not least because Blackshaw sounded renewed, revitalised; it was a beautiful performance that manifested the elegance he’d hinted at in his early playing, with an intense yet peaceable compositional spirit that suggested Blackshaw had come through a tough patch and used the lessons bound up in those struggles to disarm his occasional tendency towards the prolix. Everything here mattered. He promised an album in December 2023; 11 months later, here it is.

Blackshaw admits it was a tough one to finish, with a lot of “false starts”, finding it “difficult to get in the right headspace and concentrate”. But scheduling and expectation both be damned: there’s never any real reason to be bound by the temporal when it comes to guitar soli as tender and sensitive as Blackshaw’s. If Unraveling In Your Hands is possessed of hard-earned wisdom, that’s surely due to the multiple hurdles he’s faced down over the past few years, such that when he’s asked what the overarching threads are within the album, he firstly demurs – “I like the ambiguity and openness that instrumental music has” – before admitting, hesitantly, “for me personally, the overriding theme of the album is about loss – of loved ones, of sense of self – and coming to terms with that.”

That certainly describes the album’s opening title track, its centrepiece composition. It’s a bravura performance, at 27 minutes, that’s pieced together from constituent parts in a kind of modular construction that never admits to being Frankensteined together. There are a number of lovely themes that repeat through “Unraveling In Your Hands”, though its central phase – an unrelenting, hypnotic stream of shivering strings, tiny flecks of light dazzling as you plunge deep into the repetition, while following a snaky melody through the thickets – is certainly unforgettable.

Blackshaw hadn’t intended to write such a lengthy piece for the album but admits that everything ended up “snowballing” into its current form. “I’d end up writing new parts each time I sat down to play and then try to figure out ow they all belonged together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Eventually, I realised how long this thing was becoming and just decided to go with it, almost like a challenge or endurance test for myself.” The seeming effortlessness of the performance belies the intense craft behind it. More importantly, it seems entirely appropriate that Blackshaw should return, after nine years, with an album that opens with one of his most expansive and moving pieces for unaccompanied guitar.

If loss is a thread that runs through Unraveling In Your Hands, it’s perhaps at its most poignant on the following “Dexter”, which is named in tribute to Blackshaw’s late dog. Composed with his long-time collaborator Charlotte Glasson, it’s a breathy, soft-hearted hymnal for wheezing string drones, grounded by a simple, yet deeply affecting melody that meanders, on soft paws, throughout the song. From there, Unraveling In Your Arms concludes with “Why Keep Still?”, the taster that Blackshaw posted to Bandcamp back in 2023, settling tidily alongside the newer material, and another empathic, gently moving performance for guitar.

Unraveling… is currently only available at Blackshaw’s Bandcamp – a self-released project, it feels like he’s testing the waters, seeing how it feels to send his music back out there. But he’s also been interfacing with the public recently, having toured with Grails in Europe and the UK; here’s hoping there’s more, both recorded and live, to come. It’s very good indeed to have him back.