Andy Summers - Mysterious Barricades (1988)

Artist: Andy Summers
Title Of Album: Mysterious Barricades
Year: 1988
Label: Private Music
Style: Rock / Fusion / Instrumental / Guitar
Format: FLAC(tracks +.cue, log + full artwork )
Bitrate: Lossless
Total Time: 41:43
Total Size: 191 MB (+ 3% rec.)
The former Police guitarist's first solo instrumental album turns out to be a gentle, thoroughly domesticated continuation of his looping soundscapes with Robert Fripp earlier in the 1980s ("I Advance Masked"). Keyboardist David Hentschel is ... Full Descriptiona co-conspirator on several tracks, though Summers is perfectly content to go it alone on others. With its repeated guitar loops, interactive counterlines, gentle washes of keyboards, advancing and receding waves of effects, Summers is out to sooth and refresh, not to challenge and disturb -- and the music drifts lazily toward the shores of the soporific New Age.

"Shining Sea" definitely has a kinship with the sound of the Fripp collaborations, but shorn of their forbidding edges, and the rest floats in and out, leaving barely a trace behind. It's all very pretty and it all sounds somewhat innocuous today, now that the phenomenon of tape or digital loops is no longer an avant-garde pet preserve.

Personnel: Andy Summers (acoustic guitar, electric guitar); David Hentschel (keyboards).

Tracklist:
01. Red Balloon
02. Mysterious Barricades
03. When That Day Comes
04. Train Song
05. Luna
06. Satyric Dancer
07. Shining Sea
08. Emperor's Last Straw
09. Rain
10. Tomorrow
11. In Praise of Shadows
12. Lost Marbles, The
13. How Can I Forget