More free deep-space Western weirdness from Michael Garfield

When you think solo acoustic guitar, what comes to mind? Some classical finger-picking perhaps? Or some some folky jerkoff at a party, who needs John Belushi to come along and set his ass straight by smashing his guitar? Or maybe you think of looping alien soundscapes with a Western feel and a distinctly psychedelic mood? Yeah, that’s right. Michael Garfield has a new release called Undergrowth available. And, like his last one, it’s free and very trippy.

If you recall, we brought you word of Boulder guitarist/ambient mind-fucker Garfield’s last free release Daylighting this summer. We compared that one to the sonic explorations of the Robert Fripp/Brian Eno collaborations and said “if they’d ever done a psychedelic drug sequence on Firefly, this would have worked perfectly as the accompaniment.”

You could say the same about this one, but it has a distinctly different feel — a little livelier, a little more likely to showcase a bit of naked guitar tone and, at moments, with even more emphasis on that lonely, dusty, fly-specked Western melancholia. It’s three tracks, one of which is an alternate take on “Conglomerate” with some weird voiceover about evolution and the structure of our bodies and minds other such heavy topics.

It’s all recorded live on an acoustic guitar with various effects and looping, done in one take and edited for time. You can hear it via the embedded player below, or grab a free download of the whole thing for home/iPod listening at Michael Garfield’s Bandcamp page for Undergrowth.