The great architects of modern fingerstyle guitar built their temples with steel. While occasional outliers like Bola Sete, Tashi Dorji, or Six Organs of Admittance have reached for nylon strings, most players walking in John Fahey’s footsteps have sided with Robbie Basho, who once said that though the classical guitar might suit romance, steel strings had the “fire.” Mason Lindahl, however, proves that flame burns just as bright in nylon. He plays his classical guitar as if he were exhaling the final embers of a cave-dwelling fire, tracing the smoke as it curls through still air. His sound is paradoxical—stark yet tender, swirling yet still, violent yet hauntingly delicate.
A quiet, near-mythic figure in the instrumental guitar world, Lindahl seems to surface only when absolutely compelled to. He sometimes goes a decade between releases, polishing each piece until it feels complete. His 2021 record Kissing Rosy in the Rain marked his transition into a purely instrumental space, abandoning vocals in favor of letting the guitar speak in full. On his latest project, Joshua / Same Day Walking, that voice feels deeper, rougher, and more mysterious than ever. Recorded between Marin County, California, and just outside Reykjavík, the collection was initially meant to be two separate albums. Now paired as one continuous hour-long suite, it feels like a single vast landscape divided by weather and light—two chapters of the same fevered dream.
Lindahl’s nylon strings, traditionally instruments of softness, are played here with stormlike force. He plucks and hammers at them near the bridge, drawing a sharp, brittle tension from every note. On “Joshua Underwater,” the guitar seems to gasp and convulse as he twists the strings, nearly snapping them in pursuit of texture. “Little Sister” growls and creaks with the sound of strings striking wood, the guitar’s body becoming both drum and cage. Ghostly details drift at the edges of the frame: a faint organ hum, a decaying synthesizer, the spectral crackle of reverb that feels more like breath than sound. In “Same Day Walking,” these elements merge fully with his playing—the atmosphere itself becomes part of the performance, shaping an illusion of space that feels tactile and unsettling.
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Lindahl’s style pulls away from the folk and ragtime idioms that dominate the American Primitive tradition, embracing something darker, more fluid, and strange. His phrasing resembles a nightmarish reimagining of bolero or flamenco—melodies crawl and twist unpredictably, slipping in and out of meter as they chase unseen paths. “Long Prowl, Underwater,” the closing track of the first half, is a feverish study in tension: notes bend and shimmer like moonlight reflected on moving water. When the second half begins with “Anticipation of the Passed Baton,” the air changes. The sound becomes more restrained, more deliberate, as though Lindahl has stepped into a new landscape of silence. Even the quietest tracks—like the unnervingly beautiful “Moon Over”—carry an undercurrent of menace, suggesting that darkness is always waiting just beyond the reach of the melody.
It’s rare today to hear a guitarist pushing fingerstyle so far beyond its traditional boundaries. Lindahl’s work exists somewhere between Raphael Rogiński’s fractured jazz deconstructions and Bill Orcutt’s scorched blues improvisations, yet it’s distinguished by an introspective cosmic dread all his own. Contemporary players like Hayden Pedigo have cited him as a guiding influence, and you can see why: where Pedigo has softened American Primitive music into pastoral reverie, Lindahl drives it into the mist and shadows. Joshua / Same Day Walking feels like the sound of wandering into that darkness willingly—a doomed ferry ride through fog, where the faintest spark of nylon still glows like a dying fire in the distance.
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