Listener’s to Blackshaw’s guitar symphonies may be surprised to learn that he has no formal musical training despite having a clearly defined technique and varied vocabulary which regularly sees him deploying both exotic Eastern and traditional Western scales and a myriad of dexterous chord changes which make reference to classical music as well, of course, the intricacies of his fingerpicking style. The incorporation of such styles and theories, he says, is a natural reaction to his listening preferences athough he rejects any notion of him being a fully fledged guitar hero/virtuoso.

“I think it’s purely a case of being inspired by other music I listen to, albeit subconsciously and somehow interpreting it in a different way that is personal to me. I consider myself a composer, first and foremost, who writes and performs music for guitar. I’m not particularly fetishistic about the instrument itself, but of course my choice of instrumentation is far from incidental in relation to how I write or the way it ends up sounding. If it were within my means or ability to do so, I’d happily compose music for piano, violin, a large ensemble - anything really. It’s more a case of choosing to work with whatever tool I feel most comfortable with - which is definitely at the moment still 12-string guitar - and somehow transposing those ideas for it. I think that limitation is not necessarily a bad thing - it makes my music sound the way it does by default. That said I would love to work more with different instrumentation in the future.”

But is there any one specific thing about Blackshaw’s playing which he personally think sets him apart from the likes of say Jack Rose and Glenn Jones? “Sure. I think we all share similarities in that we have all been strongly inspired by John Fahey, Robbie Basho and other guitarists on the Takoma label to play the way we do, but stylistically I feel we are all very different. I love Jack and Glenn’s music, for the record. I think their playing is heavily influenced by pre-war Blues, Indian music and other styles that have had much less of an effect on the way I write. They also tend to write a lot in a heavily syncopated 4/4 style; I tend to write a lot in 3/4, and it is rhythmically less raw and ‘choppy’, more flowing and organic. I think my music has more in common with composers I love such as Steve Reich, early Philip Glass, Charlemagne Palestine and French composers such as Satie, Debussy.”

The Irish dates will also see Blackshaw and van Wissem’s team up under the name The Brethern of the Free Spirit, “a spiritual project combining James and myself on guitar, lute, electronics, samples and cat,” says the Dutch lutenist, who, by his own admission is as influenced by experimental acts such as Nurse With Wound and Throbbing Gristle as he is by the old Baroque tradition, as evidenced by his use of compositional techniques such as mirror imaging, William Burroughs-style cutting and pasting and musical palindromes.

An fascinating night of music awaits. It’s also worth noting that a live album out from the tour is planned for release Jozef van Wissem’s label Incunabulum Records. This Plug’d Records show is happening tonight, Thursday, March 27 at the Whiskey, Union Quay.

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