Strange Attractors
2003
Rivers And Bridges
About This Album
One looks in vain for any sort of obvious development in the music of German guitarist Steffen Basho-Junghans. As a mature artist who had been playing and studying the six- and 12-string acoustic guitar for over 20 years before he ever stepped inside a recording studio (due, in large part, to having grown up in East Germany), Basho-Junghans was seemingly already at a point where his fingers could execute pretty much anything that his mind and spirit could conceive. Having adopted guitarist Robbie Basho's name after hearing his music on record, Basho-Junghans owes a large debt to the entire Takoma record guitar school (John Fahey, Leo Kottke, Peter Lang, Basho), but he has gradually assimilated their music into a broader personal vision. Fortunately, a number of the CDs that Basho-Junghans has self-produced and released since 1995 have been licensed and distributed in the U.S. by several small but discerning U.S. record labels. This music ranges from lyrical, impressionistic fingerpicking and rich, rhythmic chordal strumming to fairly radical experimentation -- such as an exploration of the timbral possibilities of an untuned 12-string guitar to locate its "soul," or the self-imposed discipline of playing an entire piece using only one finger of his fretting hand.
Track List (try tracks 2,4,5 and 6)

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