Greg Davis

Greg Davis is part of the growing trend of musicians that arrange a comfortable cohabitation of electronic and acoustic instruments. What makes this album stand out are the well-defined folk guitar melodies that interplay with the electro-rhythm programming glitches and other sound oddities, such as a delicious analogue crackle on some tracks that offers warmth to an otherwise antiseptic medium. Listening to Arbor reminds me of music from the Morr Music label, including producers like Limp and Manual, and even some early instrumental Brian Eno, because of Davis's ability to infuse the proverbial musical ghost and the machine. On tunes like "Coventry," Davis takes his music a few notches further by adding in field recordings of what seems to be summer beach noises. The closing title track, "Arbor," is quite clearly a jewel piece that features a wonderful folk guitar tangent that flows like a gentle stream through cottage country in a John Denver kind of way. And Davis is a good guitar player, as the latter track so clearly proves. Arbor marks a standard where artists are narrowing the supposed differences between electronic and acoustic instruments, revealing that more and more, the computer is an instrument, just like the more traditional acoustic guitar.