Limited to 99, handnumbered copies
“Beyond the White” is an album of collaborations with artists including Bruno Sanfilippo, Richard Youngs, Western Skies Motel, Adrian Lane, Trigg & Gusset, Isnaj Dui and 3+ among others.
From the lapping opening of Rippling River Drifts Blue and Green, a sense of stillness and space seeps into the listener’s consciousness. Using spare instrumentation; an acoustic guitar tuned opened as a summer’s sky, some swelling, reverberated soft pads, Beyond The White unfurls gently. Visionary Hours sits somewhere between Sky Records’ more ambient excursions, a kind of abstract folk and the primitivist steel guitar work of masters like John Fahey and Robbie Basho. The difference with Visionary Hours’ approach however, is that it’s a collective effort benefited by restraint and self-possession. Each piece of music on the album is complete, lacking in nothing, a full palette that is evocative of bucolic scenes, perhaps, but often deeply meditative, with swells and chord changes that are as natural as the imagery conjured.
“I wanted to collaborate with different artists, but still keep some kind of control over the pieces,” says Visionary Hours. “In some cases, I sent the same acoustic guitar piece out to more than one artist, with the idea that two artists would unwittingly collaborate with each other on that particular piece – a blind collaboration, if you like.”