Nick Schillace

Detroit-based acoustic guitarist Nick Schillace is in an Afrobeat big band and a post-rock duo. He composes, improvises and backs up singers in string and traditional ensembles. But he's not a band guy. Sure, he did what you probably did in high school, answering friends' calls for help with their projects and building his reputation as an electric guitar player. Nick kept it up through five years of journalism study, or long enough to realize that he really didn't want his fate as a musician to rest on somebody else's whim. He quit his bands, enrolled in music school, and began pouring every idea into six strings wound to wood.

Nick was well prepared, as his parents-early members of the Detroit Blues Society and musicians themselvesÑhad toted him to folk music workshops throughout the South during his childhood. There, he met and studied with still-living purveyors of traditional music. In college, he looked back at that past through the first generation of steel-string composers. Nick dug into their releases, transcribing and studying the disparate styles but eventually arriving at an ultimate axiom: Musicians of the highest order explored their own tastes and idiosyncrasies as players, listeners and people to create highly individual music. That lesson was reinforced by a comprehensive graduate thesis focusing on Twentieth-Century American musical identity and a process for analyzing musicians in a neutral and comprehensive way. Nick got to work, applying his findings to his own music and releasing Box Canyon, his debut for acoustic guitar, three years ago.

But Landscape and PeopleÑhis second album and first for Burly Time RecordsÑis the real arrival: Like the journalist he almost became, Nick's memories narrate these tunes as his fingers spin the projector. Through it all, Nick never sounds like he's reciting or showcasing. Rather, he sounds fresh and untouched, carefully composing stories that read themselves to you with smiles, winks and nods.

This is Landscape and People. With all due respect to our favorite pickers, we think it will become your next reference point.

Horseback

Jenks Miller spent three years conceptualizing and recording Impale Golden Horn, his solo debut as Horseback, in a basement in Chapel Hill, N.C.

Impale Golden Horn isn't an ordinary drone album, and Miller--who currently spreads his time over six bands, from pop trio Un Deux Trois to spaz-and-metal melders In the Year of the Pig--isn't an ordinary drone artist. Having struggled with obsessive-compulsive disorder for 15 years, Miller conceptualized Impale Golden Horn as a holistic, glowing reaction to his symptoms and the way he envisions and fears that most essential human component, blood.

As such, each of these four connected environments builds, floats and disintegrates with a sense of detail, patience and timing that's rapturous and mesmerizing. Whether it's a resplendent ping surfacing from a submerged piano or a broad, sweeping pass from a corroded but coruscating electric guitar, Impale Golden Horn is the work of a perfectionist trying to keep his deepest worries at bay.

Bowerbirds

Bowerbirds left Burly Time Records on September 11, 2007, six years to the day after the eagle wept. Some called it terrorism, but we called it a migratory season.