Ian Leding doesn’t transition from electric guitar to acoustic guitar in the album “Lucifleure”—he excavates the whole thing. Rips it out, strings and all, and hands it to us, not as something shattered but as something newly unearthed. His love affair with the 12-string guitar isn’t just about richness or texture. It’s like the memory of forgotten ruins, where each string carries its own ghost note, a little shadow of where it could have gone but didn’t.
The project is personal, of course—these things usually are—but not in the way we typically expect. Leding is reflecting on his mind, sure, but “mind” feels like too sterile a word for it. It’s less like looking into a diary and more like stumbling into someone’s dreams halfway through a narrative, where the Djembe beats by Annie Rose feel like they could shift landscapes. Her presence feels organic and ancient, almost communal. Maybe that’s the key here—it’s all about the gathering of sounds that were, but weren’t.
There’s darkness, but not in the heavy-handed gothic sense. It’s more like walking barefoot through a field at night; there’s damp grass, soft earth, but also the ever-present hum of something unseen. Listen to “Odessa”. It was written before the Russian war on Ukraine, but feels like it knew. How? Did the guitar strings vibrate with premonition? Or is it just that some melodies allow space for truths we pretend not to know until we can’t ignore them?
Leding and Rose don’t decorate their music. They offer troubled beauty. “Lucifleure” doesn’t demand your attention—it invites, then releases, then takes you back again.
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