Peter Walker: Long Lost Tapes 1970

Label: Tompkins Square

Wait, STOP! Don’t look at the goofy cover photo of geekly grinning Peter Walker—holding an acoustic in his best smash-me-Belushi pose—until you’ve given me a chance to convince you of this record’s sublime beauty. It was late fall, according to Walker, when he put together a casual session in Woodstock with some out-of-town friends; though winter had started leaning into the upstate region, Walker and his otherworldly posse leaned right back, burning softly but insistently, embers to flames to inferno and back again, playing toward an eternal summer. Quite lovingly psychedelic and sharing much in vibe with Walker’s ragas (bells, trap drums, tabla and flute all play starring roles alongside the guitar), Long Lost Tapes is a prayer of human magic, perfect in your multidisc player next to Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda and Pharoah Sanders’s late-60s and early-70s work, as well as your favorite canonical guitar magi. (M.L. Thrope)