180g black vinyl with poly-lined black paper sleeve and double-sided insert. There's a lineage of American fingerstyle guitar that runs from the Piedmont porches of Elizabeth Cotten through Robbie Basho's visionary expansions into spiritual territory - and then, somehow, into the waters. With his second full-length album, Brooklyn-based guitarist Ben Van Bonn acknowledges these predecessors while floating wordlessly into terrain they never mapped.

Further Than Thought is aquatic music in the truest sense. Recorded at St. Ann & The Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Brooklyn, with its natural reverb lending sacred dimension to already luminous tones, Van Bonn's fingerpicking shimmers like light refracting through moving water. His custom 12-fret 000 guitar, built by Raymond Morin and Adam Rousseau, becomes an instrument of strange new possibilities - producing fountains of harmonies that seem physically unreachable through traditional techniques.

What sets this apart from the crowded field of solo acoustic guitar is Van Bonn's refusal to settle into the contemplative drift that characterizes so much of the genre. These twelve pieces pulse with quiet momentum. Tracks like "Great West Arch" and "Kite Hill Jump" carry an almost Kosmische sense of forward motion, while "Fish, Clams, Scallops" and "Gleaming Shallows" evoke tidal patterns - the constant push and pull of water against shore. The occasional presence of electric bass adds depth without weight, grounding the guitar's crystalline upper register in something darker and more resonant.

The titles read like a map of specific places - Hart Pond, Karegnondi, Scotty's Bay - and there's a deep sense of American landscape running through this music, though it's landscape seen from below the surface. Van Bonn trained as a visual artist, and it shows: Further Than Thought has the quality of light moving through water in a painting, that particular shimmer that's so difficult to capture.

Following his 2022 debut Myth of the Middle Rung, Van Bonn has refined his approach without losing any of its wonder. Mixed by Raziel Castaneda in Grand Haven, Michigan and mastered by Alex DeTurk at The Bunker Studio in Brooklyn, the production is immaculate - every harmonic overtone, every scrape of finger on string captured with remarkable clarity.

For listeners who have worn out their copies of Basho's The Falconer's Arm or find themselves returning endlessly to the pastoral experimentalism of James Blackshaw and Jack Rose, here is music that honors that tradition while genuinely extending it. Van Bonn has found his own water, and it runs deep.