By the time of The Cloud Of Unknowing, it seemed that James Blackshaw was such a proficient twelve string acoustic guitar player that he may even have been a little bored of people like me telling him so. Being compared to the likes of John Fahey, Robbie Basho and Leo Kottke would probably be enough for most (if someone even used my name in the same sentence as any one of those three, I’d be carving the sentence on my own tombstone and then smashing myself repeatedly on the head with it), but not for him. His subsequent releases have shown him deliberately straining against such categorisation; opening The Litany Of Echoes on piano (gasp! piano!) seemed like a bold statement at the time, but it was just part of Blackshaw’s ongoing quest for something bigger – something more complex, even, but not complex in the same way as that earlier work.

From that moment on, it has felt less about the continued development of his technical ability on the one instrument, and more about developing his skills as a composer and arranger of pieces for many more. The subsequent The Glass Bead Game, his first for Michael Gira’s Young God Records, with its chamber piece strings and Reich-like use of vocals was often unrecognisable as folk music at all, and that was more than likely the point. All Is Falling develops his reputation even further in this direction.

The first thing you notice with the album is that Blackshaw has dispensed with track titles. These aren’t mere songs any more; these are sections of an eight part suite. A statement of intent, no doubt. Second, you notice the instrumentation- once more, he opens on piano, with strings following closely behind, but more notably there is no acoustic guitar on this at all. Blackshaw’s guitar of choice, as heard first on ‘Part 2′ is the twelve string electric. That alone isn’t enough to drag him out of the aforementioned lineage, for the fast tumbling electric arpeggios are instantly reminiscent of fellow Fahey acolyte Ben Chasny’s work as Six Organs Of Admittance, particularly on the relatively stripped back “Part 5″. But, for the most part, this is on a far grander scale than any of Chasny’s work.

For on All Is Falling, Blackshaw’s classical ambitions really flower. The album features, as well as his guitar and piano, arrangements for glockenspiel, saxophone, flute, percussion, violin, cello and voice. Gone is any notion of him improvising, there simply wouldn’t be the space for him to do so. So is this an attempt to follow in the lineage of those composers who primarily wrote for the electric guitar, like Glenn Branca or Rhys Chatham? Well, partly, perhaps. There are none of those composers’ ragged edges or heavy metal thunder; if he borrows from those it is their minimalist structures and use of repetition, and if he borrows from those he borrows at least as much from Glass or Reich. All Is Falling feels far more architectural than his previous work, at times nakedly so: in ‘Part 6′, the time signatures are actually counted out, numbers and structure merging into one like a Tom Johnson piece.

However an at least equally prominent influence is likely to be Current 93: a band Blackshaw is currently a member of, playing with them as part of their current expanded formation (along with the likes of Andrew WK, Baby Dee, and a fair smattering of strings) in concert and on their Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain and recent Baalstorm, Sing Omega LPs, and a band that cuts across rock, electronic, classical and folk traditions, unifying them as part of David Tibet’s turbulent musical vision. The emotional swell which propels the stunning ‘Part 7′ could easily support one of Tibet’s apocalyptic nursery rhymes, with its churning guitars and weeping strings. The air raid siren impressions at the end give it a nightmarish finale of which Tibet would no doubt approve, before these bleed into the pulsing drones of ‘Part 8′.

For a long time now, it has been obvious that Blackshaw’s musical interests stretch far beyond the guitar. Successfully combining these interests to create the impressive All Is Falling may well be his greatest success of all. Well, that and the fact that the likes of me will now have to refer to him as a composer, not merely as a guitarist.