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Guitarist/composer Ben Garnett’s sophomore studio album, Kite’s Keep (2025), reimagines the acoustic guitar not as a lead voice, but as a cinematic landscape—an evocative space where fiddle, bass, and ensemble interplay bring guitar-born ideas to new life. With a dream team of acoustic virtuosos and a composer’s eye for drama and narrative, Garnett crafts songs that feel like short films—shifting fluidly from folk to bluegrass, pop to jazz, classical to avant-garde. For listeners ready to explore the guitar’s untapped world-building power, Kite’s Keep is an invitation to lean in and look again.
“You think you’ve heard it all until a Ben Garnett comes along to show us how much more there might be.”
— PREMIER GUITAR
“Garnett has a beautiful, curious, deep mind.”
— CHRIS ELDRIDGE (PUNCH BROTHERS)
Jake Blount (pronounced: blunt) is an award-winning interpreter of Black folk music based in Providence, RI. Initially recognized for his skill as a string band musician, Blount has charted an unprecedented, Afrofuturist course on his pilgrimage through sound archives and song collections. In his hands, the banjo, fiddle, electric guitar and synthesizer become ceremonial objects used to channel the insurgent creativity of his forebears. From transfixing solo sets to full-band festival appearances complete with crowd-surfing and ecstatic chants, Blount’s performances - like his recent Smithsonian Folkways releases, symbiont (2024) and The New Faith (2022) - seamlessly merge centuries-old traditional songs with the trappings and techniques of modern Black genres. This “genrequeer” approach to the traditions has earned his music a place in the very same archives from which he extracts his repertoire. In defiance of genre categories, revisionist histories and linear time, Blount fashions an “Afrofuturist folklore” that disintegrates the boundaries between acoustic and electric, artist and medium, and ancestor and progeny.
