Two fantastic documents of music from the hot coal mind of Alan Sondheim. Choreographer/writer/musician, Alan Sondheim is the rare breed of individual that fantastically combines Americana-roots-blues ideology and feeling and contemporary-up-to-the-minute thought. These two records, released as reasonably priced 500-copy limited-editions on Fire Museum, are excellent and come highly recommended.
The Songs — a reissue of the original Riverboat label LP recorded with the full band (Ritul-All-7-70) who also join Sondheim on another early release on ESP — is something of a free-jazz song cycle. It's intense and extremely loose, but with a good direction and overall feel.
Ski/nn seems to be a newer recording and is all solo guitar and solo alpine zither. This is very heady experimental guitar work in the American blues tradition of folks like John Fahey or Charlie Nothing, but entirely distinctive (and successful). Richard Bishop would be a modern day peer and reference point, but fans of his who have only heard his excellent Salvador Kali CD on Revenant probably couldn't do better than explore this CD rather than seeing what else Richard Bishop has up his sleeve.
