Adam Caine Trio: Thousandfold

Guitarist Adam Caine displays his endlessly innovative creative instinct on Thousandfold. Bassist Tom Blancarte and drummer John Wagner supply a steadfastly well-defined surface onto which Caine thoroughly infuses multidirectional vibrations as varied in color and texture as possible.

The guitarist splurges on extraordinarily unique patterns of fingering and plunges into chasms of reverberation. As sparks fly off his strings, Caine demonstrates expressive control of his instrument, the bass and the drums responsible for maintaining the hidden tempo beneath the persistence of staccato picking. Integrated with the thump of the bass drum, artful rattling of loose snare, low-end tom resonance, cymbal swishes or deep bass string pizzicatos, the guitar unwinds its fiery, nearly pointillist schema within indescribable improvisational bounds.

Caine changes the purity of the guitar's tone with more than ample pedaling and amplifier artifice. "Castros," "Howl," "Invisible Kingdom" and "Human Body" exemplify how he allows ornamentation to absorb, transform and expand the guitar's essential tonalities. He employs fingering that is slightly straightforward, then begins to bend pitches, strum, form clusters, use tiny glissandos, pluck in odd combinations and completely adjust the sequencing of the processes. In the title track, the guitar sound morphs into something akin to an organ.

The music has no identifiable thematic material, is self-referential and transpires so easily that locking into a listening trance might happen often. The guitar subsides infrequently into a place where the drums and bass come to the forefront, for instance, in the last three of eight cuts. The purest guitar tones end the record concurrently with a dusting of the snare.

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