Songs run the gamut from fingerstyle ballads to psychedelic waltzes and raga-inspired blues. I also don't know how they managed to not capture the one overly excited guy making noise at the bar who is always on every live recording.
The extra bit of magic is the fact that this was recorded live and it shows how well they play together, how they speak one language, how they are able to improvise, bounce ideas back and forth and just complement each other. The album consists of seven guitar duets and it's like both guys are talking about their favorite music that spans from American and British folk, over jazz to Indian ragas and North African music traditions. It was crafted over a month long, Friday night residency at The Whistler, a live music venue/gallery/record label in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood. Land of Plenty is a phenomenal collaboration between the two Chicago based guitarists Bill MacKay and Ryley Walker. Although recorded in a bar in front of a capacity crowd, it’s not until the album’s final seconds that the fourth wall is dropped and the listener can hear the crowd’s raucous applause. Like their live set up, Bill’s guitar can be heard on the left of the stereo picture and Ryley’s on the right. Guitar tone was a key element when selecting the tracks that made the cut.
Land of Plenty is completely instrumental and falls somewhere between Ryley Walker’s acclaimed new album, Primrose Green (Dead Oceans), and Bill MacKay’s highly melodic work in Darts & Arrows. Alex Inglizian of Experimental Sound Studios recorded the final two shows of the residency and Erik Hall (In Tall Buildings, Wild Belle) mixed the seven tracks that comprise Land of Plenty. Each week, songs took on new shapes, while others were written and added to the always-evolving set list. The overall spirit of the residency was that of a creative workshop producing music that ran in directions as wide as the duo’s interests. In January 2015, Bill and Ryley took up a month-long, Friday night residency at The Whistler, a live music venue/gallery/record label in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood. Over the course of the year, an impressive repertoire of new songs and ideas coalesced.
The duo quickly developed their own musical vocabulary and the resulting sounds drew on traditional folk music from Appalachia to Northern India, as well as jazz and blues. They soon began meeting at Bill’s southwest Chicago home to write and improvise together on their lived-in dreadnought 6-string guitars, with Ryley's 12-string and Bill's requinto making frequent appearances as the year wore on. Chicago-based guitarists Bill MacKay and Ryley Walker met in January 2014 at a friend’s birthday party where they discovered a mutual admiration for Albert King, Laura Nyro, Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, Ali Akbar Khan and Jimi Hendrix.
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