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Reviews

Jeff Pearce — Night Thoughts
(Bandcamp Jeff Pearce Music no#, 2025, CD / DL)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2025-11-18

Night Thoughts Cover art

Jeff Pearce offers powerful evidence of what can be accomplished using electric guitar as the basis for ambient music, and over the course of over two dozen albums and innumerable single tracks going back to the mid-90s, he continues creating stunning music from his home base near Indianapolis. Nine of the eleven tracks on Night Thoughts were drawn from two previous EPs heretofore only available as downloads, 2024’s Nightstream and from earlier in 2025, Ethereal Night; two additional tracks were added, and as such the album under review here is now available as a compact disc. The eleven instrumental pieces fall into a couple different categories, fingerpicked melodic pieces for electric guitar, dripping with gobs of reverb and space echo and other beautiful shimmering effects, often ovedubbed with subtle loops and orchestrations filling in the background, and the other would be more slowly evolving pieces offering a more floating ambient sound, and then a few more that seem to straddle those two soundworlds. Either way, what we have here is a set of completely immersive pieces, dreamy and fluid, sounds that can be appreciated on a number of levels. I first recall hearing his music on the 2000 Hypnos label album To the Shores of Heaven, and shortly after that he began releasing all his music on his own private label Jeff Pearce Music. The more floating ambient pieces in this collection include the near ten-minute “Nightstream” as well as the near fourteen-minute epic “Farther,” the former more bold and overtly melodic, and the latter drifts in slowly as if one is falling into a dream of slow shifting pastel colors. The fingerpicked pieces include the opener “Ethereal Night,” the gentle yet moving “And You Will Never Know,” and one of the new tracks, the beautiful and shimmering epic “By Moonlight.” There isn’t a dull track on this disc anywhere, each piece seems to be perfectly positioned to pick up where the previous one left off, making for a comprehensive journey through the sounds of night. 

Filed under: New releases, 2025 releases

Related artist(s): Jeff Pearce

More info
http://jeffpearcemusic.bandcamp.com/album/night-thoughts

 

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