The latest album from guitarist/composer Ian Bouras, A Blind Painter’s Guide to Coloring Breath, is an attention-grabbing mix of instrumentals. It’s a completely DIY project, as are all recordings from Bouras, and he is presenting these songs in demo form. Despite the nature of such recordings, the eight tracks he slated for release here do not sound unfinished.
Bouras lives with the neurological disorder Ataxia and spent time in various psychiatric facilities during 2020 following the recording of these demos. He had trouble reconnecting with his instrument and the material following his release but, instead of ditching the project altogether, Bouras has released the collection as-is. “A Fleeting Life in a Square” will strike a familiar note for Bouras’ longtime listeners and the probing guitar work, ran through a loop, invokes feeling with only a few notes. His performances often possess a high degree of improvisation and this is no exception. It has the quality of a spraying water spring spiraling high into the air.
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The third track “Murals of Moments at the Devil’s Tea Party” is one of the album’s peak moments. It possesses the same probing character of the first cut, but the spirit moving this track are a little darker than in the earlier track. It has the same extended length common to Bouras’ material, but you’ll be hard pressed identifying any fat on this track. He upends listeners expectations with the track “Perspectives” by giving the guitar work a warped slant lacking in preceding or succeeding songs. It is even longer than the earlier track yet his capacity for varying the instrumental approach makes for dramatic listening.
“The Darkness that Clothed an Angel” will be the favorite for many. His musical ideas sound much more developed here than earlier cuts such as the opener. Bouras mixes the ethereal and melancholy in equal measure and the complementary moods blend into a near cinematic listening experience. “The Necessity of Continual Movement” is, arguably, the closest thing to a throwaway number on this release when you compare its running time to other tracks. It will impress many as a dry run for a longer track that never came and, as a result, isn’t as satisfying as the other songs.
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He ends A Blind Painter’s Guide to Coloring Breath with “Weeks Become Months, and Memories Become Melodies”. It is an appropriately dramatic final curtain for Ian Bouras’ collection of demos and emphasizes, for a final time, how far along he had come with this project before his hospitalizations. You can’t keep a good guitar player down. Even an unattentive listener will know, even a single spin of this release, Ian Bouras is a musician who takes art’s cathartic value. Such an ideal burns in the heart of A Blind Painter’s Guide to Coloring Breath and informs everything Ian Bouras does. He will never be a mainstream musician, but there’s nothing about this music suggesting he harbors such aspirations. We can expect his future work to follow the same path and produce the same first class results.
Jodi Marxbury