Amrit Sond's debut album is 11 tracks' worth of reflective solo acoustic guitar music that recalls the early days of the Windham Hill label. Before "new age" was a musical genre, the Windham Hill artists were a group of musical oddballs making records that fit in no ready-made slot, and
Circular Motion has that same sense of being lost in time and space: this is a record that could have been recorded at any point in the last three decades. Neither as rootsy as
John Fahey or as quirkily experimental as
the Durutti Column, but containing elements of both, these songs range from surprisingly driving (the compelling opener, "Vertical Time," which maintains a remarkable sense of forward velocity) to more typically serene (the lyrical, spacy "Reaching Out [For Gravity]"), maintaining enough variety and diversity within the necessarily limited musical palette that the album rarely becomes merely a pleasant background wash. This is a surprising and entertaining debut. ~ Stewart Mason