Buck Curran has always carried a certain mystic resonance through his music, first as one half of the beloved alt-folk duo Arborea and now as a solo artist steadily carving his own path. On Far Driven Sun, his ninth solo release, Curran returns to the core of what first defined his sound: the elemental voice of the acoustic steel-string guitar.
This record feels both like a homecoming and a deepening of the experience. Curran is reunited with his rare 1990 Stefan Sobell “Butterfly” Model 1 guitar, an instrument that shaped Arborea’s earliest recordings and that, here, becomes the portal for intricate improvisations, shimmering overtones, and ethereal soundscapes.
His playing leans into alternate tunings, brass slide, and EBow, creating tones that are simultaneously intimate and cosmic. Each track seems suspended in time, built around patience, space, and the slow unfurling of harmonic color.
There are moments of quiet surprise: the flowing, melodic bass of Nataly Kozlova on “Unicorn Song” and “ILiad (Slight Return),” or the dynamic, earthy drumming of Francesco Di Lenge on the latter. These contributions ground Curran’s spectral guitar in a subtle rhythmic gravity, widening the sonic palette without disturbing its meditative core.
What lingers most in Far Driven Sun is its balance of intricacy and spaciousness. The compositions are not showpieces but living, breathing landscapes: plaintive, mystical, and open to the unknown. It’s an album of mostly quiet reflections and rumination, one that draws as much on the silence between notes as the resonances themselves.
Curran has often been linked to the American primitive tradition, but here he seems less concerned with lineage and more with sound as pure presence. Far Driven Sun is a reaffirmation of music as a space for wonder, an exploration of tone and timbre as luminous as the record’s title suggests.
Recorded in Bergamo, Italy, between 2024 and 2025, and mastered by Harris Newman in Montreal, the album exhibits the clarity of careful craftsmanship while retaining an organic immediacy. With Echodelick Records and Obsolete Recordings giving it form on LP and digital, Far Driven Sun stands as one of Curran’s most meditative and resonant works to date.
Leave a Reply