Deeper Steps Into The New Path is several leagues removed from song-based, radio friendly unit-shifting melody and, as such, repays a certain amount of concentration and effort from the listener. A single track clocking in at a shade over eighteen minutes, it’s a recording of a live improvisation for prepared guitar and electronics performed at Pegasus in Oxford on 28 June 2013 by LR/GW, aka Lee Riley Guitar Works.

With a guitar fed through a series of effects and a mixing board, Riley controls and manipulates what is, in effect, endless waves of feedback. Skating around the relentlessly gloomy tone set by a lot of dark ambient music, the piece falls – either accidentally or by design – into a series of phases. Overall the feeling generated is rather claustrophobic and sinister, at times almost unbearably so, but this is offset by a deft handling of volume, texture and tone. This means that the occasional reduction of the mid-range fuzz at the piece’s core is an uplifting, satisfying experience; it makes the piece more human and reflective than it may have been as a relentless barrage of sound.

A photograph on the interior of the CD version of Deeper Steps Into The New Path shows what looks like a semi-collapsed air balloon in a grassy field, weighed down by an ominous sky. It’s a good choice of image to accompany the work, which moves through the cyclical building of disparate layers into an increasingly dark voyage, buffeted by an upper atmosphere of high pitched tones; glimpsing beyond the sky before crashing to the earth.