Dean McPhee’s ‘Northern Earth’ Sets Instrumental Guitar in Open Terrain

Dean McPhee has spent more than a decade moving through the quieter margins of guitar music, releasing on small labels before taking his recent work under his own Bass Ritual imprint. Northern Earth, his latest, continues that path with a fully instrumental set built around repetition and slow emotional shifts.

The guitar lines are drenched in reverb, alternating slide-like textures with modal, cyclical melodies. McPhee’s phrasing sits closer to ritual than riff, and the pieces unfold with the patience of someone more interested in atmosphere than arrival. There are echoes of 1970s kosmische excursions — Popol Vuh, Ash Ra Tempel, the loop-based gravity of Fripp and Eno — but the record avoids revivalism. Its mood is more solitary: open space, faint percussive detail, and a sense of wandering that holds together without lyrics or obvious climax.

McPhee’s earlier 2011 release for Blast First Petite, the label run by Mute’s Paul Smith, already showed how fixed his instincts were. Northern Earth refines that language rather than reinventing it. The result lands somewhere between cosmic Americana and the patient instrumental zones associated with Labradford, Stars of the Lid, and Pan•American — music that could score a slow road film or the dry vistas of Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff.

What gives the record weight is its restraint. McPhee doesn’t force meaning onto these pieces; he lets them breathe until their scale becomes the point.