JIM GHEDI & TOBY HAY

The Hawksworth Grove Sessions

CAMBRIAN 8/10 Fresh fingerstyle workouts.

Roughly 100 miles separate Jim ghedi and Toby hay, as the crow flies. ghedi currently lives in Moss Valley, a stretch of bluebell-strewn woodlands northeast of Derbyshire, while hay hails from Rhayader, a remote rural town deep in the rocky heart of mid-Wales. But the past few years, the pair have walked a similar path. Both are students of the same tradition – the intricate art of fingerstyle guitar – and both rose to prominence around the same time, through the same channels. Since 2015, hay has turned out a string of releases on his own Cambrian Records, blending wandering folk, subtle orchestral flourishes and a spaciousness that captures something of the tranquillity of the great outdoors. hay also released ghedi’s 2015 debut, Home Is Where I Exist, Now To Live & Die, and the younger guitarist followed it up this January with A Hymn

For Ancient Land – a record of 12-string invention and occasional quavering songcraft that imagined him as an earthier heir to the great American guitarist Robbie Basho.

This clear kinship largely explains why, in the winter of 2015, the pair found themselves squeezed into a car with a couple of guitars, driving around the British Isles and playing shows wherever they could get themselves a booking. Between shows, the pair would fill the downtime by pulling out guitars and jamming. Such impromptu sessions revealed both a shared sensibility and a complementary style. First they took it to the stage; then they decided to put it to wax. The Hawksworth Grove Sessions is humble in ambition and design. In their respective solo work, the pair augment their playing with subtle instrumentation, like strings, harmonium or double bass. Not so here. These 10 instrumental tracks are played entirely on six- and 12-string guitar, and came together in two days of recording at hay’s brother’s house in leeds, improvised live with no overdubs. The record’s simplicity, in many ways, is the root of its appeal. ghedi and hay have a natural rapport, sparking off one another, knowing when to take the lead and when to yield. here there are spry downhill canters (“The Earls of Errol”), misty-morning reveries (“Arran To Aboyne”), furious bursts of baroque picking (“The huntsman And The horse”) and twilight rambling (“Night, Moon, Dance”). Still, to imply any real separation of tone or style here would be to overstate things. Moods flow into one another, and tracks turn on a sixpence; it just takes one compelling melody to spark off a new interaction, and suddenly things are cascading off down a whole new path.

ghedi and hay may be working in a deep tradition, but there’s something to The Hawksworth

Grove Sessions that feels distinct; a blend of background, age and sensibility. Around the turn of the century, a new generation of American fingerstyle guitarists emerged – folk like Jack Rose or Ben Chasney, many of whom grew up on hardcore and post-rock, and heard in the American Primitive music of John Fahey et al a sort of DIy self-reliance. ghedi and hay share a bit of that – hay started out playing in post-rock bands, and a certain jazzy studiousness persists in his music. But their music seems aligned more with a current trend in British literature; that of authors like Robert MacFarlane and helen Macdonald, whose writing on nature and landscape draws lines between the topography of land and the shape of human experience. MacFarlane himself penned the sleevenotes to hay’s 2017 album The Gathering. “Place, memory, nature, loss and dreamed-of geographies are the subjects of this beautiful music,” wrote MacFarlane. “The world’s dew gleams on this music, but the world’s dust swirls through it too.”

Prior to now, ghedi and hay’s records have often had the qualities of reveries, as if their music was part submerged in their native soil. The Hawksworth Grove Sessions takes a different tack. This is a record that embraces the itinerant thrill of tour life, with track titles – “goat Fell”, “Wesleyan”, “Arran To Abyone” – flung out like postcards, or road signs spied for a moment before they disappear in the rearview mirror. The pair describe the music as “instinctual”, but don’t let its footloose nature fool you. In this plucky journey over hill and dale, we hear the pair developing a new relationship to their surroundings, one powered by friendship, fine music and the prospects of an open road.