(Note: this review ends with a poor quality and highly unoriginal pun. Readers of a sensitive disposition should avert their eyes now, go stare at some kittens or something). He is everywhere these days, James Blackshaw. I have even started seeing him at gigs, and when someone new by the name of Blackshaw started at work recently, I actually felt compelled to check that we hadn’t employed a guitarist to liven the place up a bit (well, my suggestion of a random employee sacrifice on the altar of the photocopier was vetoed, so I assumed they must have had a better idea). In the wake of last year’s excellent The Cloud of Unknowing album come these two unmissable new releases.

The Brethren of the Free Spirit are a duo of Blackshaw on guitar and Jozef Van Wissem on lute. They open with a serenely meditative piece entitled “The Lifting Of The Veil”, whose delicate procession is brought to halt by, oddly, a burst of recorded applause. This seems to jolt the album back into life, the title track which follows is an intricate intermingling of strings which churns like a mantra and evidences the intense spirituality hinted at in the title. After an abstract and scarily godless-sounding piece, “In Him Is No Sin” ends the album on a more hopeful note, the players singing once from the same hymnsheet.

The Garden of Forking Paths is Blackshaw’s curatorial attempt to trace a lineage of strings, drawing four lines way back to meet somewhere over the horizon of time. It is topped and tailed by the most striking exhibit: the koto of Chieko Mori; on “Spiral Wave” it rattles along excitingly, underpinned by an almost electronic sounding rhythmic fragment. Blackshaw’s guitar-driven “A Broken Hourglass” is a typically long, controlled tumble which rises to brief exclamations of near-religious euphoria, while his collaborator Van Wissem’s contribution is more understated albeit with a terrific middle section of lively lute. Between these two, Espers’ Helena Espvall arrow off along the garden’s most deviant fork, a sinister smear of cello which lends the compilation a dark heart.

You can pick these two up at Boomkat/Boomkat. They are (cringe/cringe) fingerpickin’ good. Sorry, I warned you.