2004:
Contact Echoes
And the man who discovered Winston, founded Windham Hill Records and launched the finger-style guitar Renaissance, Will Ackerman, came out with a solo album called Returning. He revisits some of his best known compositions from the last 30 years and records definitive versions full of nuance and space that make the earlier renditions sound antique. Curiously, for all the guitarists Ackerman influenced and all that we play, he's the only one to appear on either list. He also produced and played on Jeff Oster's electronica-pastoral jazz outing, At Last.
While those artists looked back, Nouveau Flamenco creator Ottmar Liebert tweaked his sound forward with electronica and glitch editing techniques while still remaining predominantly acoustic on his La Semana CD.
Meanwhile, two pioneers of ambience, Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, got together for their first album of new music in 30 years, The Equatorial Stars, a deeply ambient and understated work of sound texture. It's startling how much Eno's ambient music still influences artists. Musicians like Lori Carson, with her atmospheric dream vocals on The Finest Thing, Green Isac with their quirky ethno-techno on Etnotronica, as well as Lanterna, BT, Erik Wollo and Jon Hopkins are still dipping into the ambient well Eno drilled 30 years ago.
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William Ackerman
Ottmar Liebert
Lori Carson
