Sean Shibe: softloud – Music for Acoustic and Electric Guitar

Sean Shibe is one of those bright young virtuosi who see programming as an act of creative challenge and responsibility rather than dull routine. Don’t be fooled by the initial delicacies on this disc – arrangements of music from four early Scottish lute manuscripts. Though beautiful and simple in their own right, and played with gorgeous sensitivity by Shibe in his own guitar arrangements, they are merely the start of an absorbing aural journey that treads gently into the 20th and 21st centuries with James Macmillan’s dreamy

From Galloway and his meditative Motet I from Since it was the Day of Preparation, before awakening to the multi-tracked minimalist haze of Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, Julia Wolfe’s gallus LAD (raw-edged and written originally for nine bagpipes), and David Lang’s violent

Killer, where heavy metal collides head-on with the classical avantgarde.

Ken Walton