Michael Hix is a founding member of the Nashville Ambient Ensemble, an ambient Americana collective whose 2021 album Cerulean was one I discovered in the spring of that year along with Luke Schneider's pedal steel ambient drone lp Altar Of Harmony. In some ways I always associate them with lockdown and also with Isaac's death. The combination of traditional instruments and synths, ambient drones and plucked strings, was more or less the only music that made sense to me for a while in the period after he died, the weeks and months in late 2021/ early 2022. Elegy (appropriately enough) is from Cerulean.
Michael Hix is about to release a solo album titled Wonderful Aspiration Of The Source, ten instrumentals for electric guitar partly inspired by his Buddhist meditation and partly by a need to simplify (part of the same thing I imagine). There are two tracks currently at Bandcamp, Cadence and Deer Park, both played entirely using electric guitar, no synths or pedal steel, just a Telecaster and some live looping set ups. Both conjure Vini Reilly gone to Nashville to some extent for me- minimal and emotive guitar playing, crossing the blurry lines between ambient Americana and cosmic country.
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Do you know Shrunken Elvis, the recent Spencer Cullum project? They work in a vaguely similar area to the Nashville Ambient Ensemble, yet I could quite imagine a couple of their tunes being remixed in a Balearic style.
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