Full disclosure: I’ve known Donald Miller for 20 years since he first moved to New Orleans and worked closely with him in countless performances with our group The Death Posture and other ensembles. So that might lead one to think I’d be too close to the subject at hand, too predisposed to praise this album, a mere acolyte not to be trusted. But in truth and reality, by being this close to his musical methodologies I’m probably one of his harshest critics—so familiar with what Miller does and how he does it, and maybe more importantly why—that I’m more likely to notice when he’s off his game or turning in a performance below the notoriously high standard he applies so mercilessly to everyone else.

The great bulk of Miller’s recorded output since 1980 is with Borbetomagus, that infamous New York sonic monolith that inadvertently spearheaded the noise genre when in fact they were forging an intersection where Xenakis’ seismic shifts and Ayler’s ecstatic howl meet Hendrix’s Monterey burnt offering. But in private Miller nurtured a contrastingly delicate aspect of his guitar artistry on the acoustic 12-string, inspired by fellow Maryland native John Fahey, but drawing from a whole ’nuther trick bag and arriving at strikingly different ends. Over the years I even managed to harangue him into playing the rare acoustic set, during which listeners would remark “I didn’t know Donald could play like that!” But one must be careful with this sort of thing. True artists bristle when pressured to present the accessible aspects of their work. You wouldn’t be fool enough to ask Francis Bacon to paint fruit baskets, would you?

Which brings us to the record at hand, and I’m pleased to say he’s finally done it and made the acoustic album I always knew he had in him, presented in a beautiful LP edition with a suitably regal cover and large repros of Miller’s surreal collages, all portending the beguilingly dark spells cast in the sounds therein. The shimmering overtones of the 12-string suit Miller’s aesthetic marvelously, as he moves from relentless swirls that invoke Charlemagne Palestine’s “Strumming Music”, to abrasive sustained bowing, to elegant Malagasy-esque ripples, to deconstructed slide blues that sound like a lost Blind Willie McTell slide played backwards. Miller astutely avoids the obvious and leaves a breadcrumb trail to hidden treasures, revealing his highly personal cosmology in the process.