Alec Goldfarb doesn't play guitar so much as translate other instruments through it. Trained in the Senia-Maihar gharana — the lineage that produced Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan — he bends and slides notes the way a sitar or sarod would, coaxing the ornaments of that tradition out of six strings that were never built for them. Shadows, released on 27 June 2025, is the record where that vocabulary meets an even wider set of instruments than usual.
The album followed two years Goldfarb spent travelling through Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam, in 2022 and 2023, less on a research trip than an extended, unhurried apprenticeship — field recordings, informal lessons, evenings spent listening rather than transcribing. What came back with him wasn't a survey of Southeast Asian music so much as a set of relationships.
The most important one plays rebab.
Roni Driyastoto, a Javanese experimentalist who works the two-string spike fiddle into something closer to noise music than court gamelan, appears on 'Rebab Consort', his instrument scratching and sliding against Goldfarb's guitar in a tuning built for neither of their traditions. Elsewhere, the New York-based gayageum player DoYeon Kim brings the Korean zither's bent, sliding tones to 'Ghi-ta', and the nay player Gideon Forbes threads Middle Eastern breath through 'Relics'. Every track sits in its own tuning world, drawn from Indonesian, Thai or Vietnamese systems rather than the twelve equal steps a guitar usually assumes.
Goldfarb frames the whole thing through wayang, the shadow-puppet theatre of Java and Bali, where audiences watch silhouettes rather than the puppets themselves. "The music asks questions about imagined continuities, alternate histories, and unrealized encounters," he says of the project, "about how traditions travel, change, and reshape one another, while remaining deeply rooted." It's a tidy description of a record built less on fusion — that tired word — than on patient, genuine contact.
Shadows arrives as a sequel to 2024's Fire Lapping at the Creek, praised by A Closer Listen and the NYC Jazz Record, and follows a career that has taken Goldfarb from Anthony Braxton's Creative Music Orchestra to a 2018 composer residency with the choreographer Jonah Bokaer at The Joyce Theater. None of that quite prepares a listener for how strange and specific Shadows sounds — a guitar record that keeps insisting it's something else.
