Since their quiet debut in 2019, the Canadian imprint, Morning Trip, has emerged as an imprint of remarkable connoisseurship, issuing some of the most strikingly beautiful, genre defiant reissues we’ve seen in the last year. With names like Laraaji & Lyghte, Brent Snyder, Don Slepian, and Karma Moffett already under their belt, it’s hard to imagine them upping their own game, but this is what they’ve managed with their first release of 2020, a long awaited reissue of William Eaton’s 1978 masterstroke, Music by William Eaton. Entirely singular and as stunning as solo guitar records come, for collectors it has long been one of the great holy grails in the private-press world.

William Eaton belongs to the second generation of guitar soli, a musical idiom of unaccompanied guitar music that evolved in the United States from early efforts by John Fahey and those who immediately followed in his wake - Robbie Basho, Peter Walker, Leo Kottke, etc. - pursuing a radical hybrid between American folk idioms, Western classical music, and a diverse number of traditions from across the globe. Eaton, however, stands slightly apart from his own generation, most of whom tended to veer toward a more explicit form of traditionalism. His was an adventurous journey, riddled with experimentation and stretching toward the unknown. While sounding entirely distinct, his music presents a deep relation to the avant-gardism that lies unacknowledged at the very roots of guitar soli.

Music by William Eaton, privately issued by the artist in 1978, stands at a fascinating crossroads of instrumental guitar music, in part the result of Eaton’s development of a series of new instruments as a luthier, each adding new dimensions to his playing, while allowing new layers of meaning to unfold. Recorded on 6 string, 12 string, 26 string (Elesion Harmonium) and double neck quadraphonic electric guitar, the album equally encounters the development of new holistic approaches to music making on acoustic instruments that mirrors many of Eaton’s peers in the field of New Age and ambient music, drawing on the landscape of the American South-West in which he resides and works. Eaton's is a music born of solitude and contemplation, melodies and patterns formed in the company of a symphonic tapestry of bubbling streams and singing birds.

Conceived as a series of 18 untitled “tone poems”, Music by William Eaton has, since its release, remained one of the great efforts of 1970s guitar soli. Vast in its range of approach - from shimmering washes of tone that flirt with the work of Laraaji, complex distances and structure at the borders of Harry Partch, to elegant and deceptively simple lines, poetic phrasings, and melodic meanderings that allude to luminaries like Basho and Fahey - there is nothing quite like it in the field. Absolutely beautiful and immersive from start to finish, we can’t express how happy we are to have this one in our hands. Morning Trip has done it again.