Album Review: I Am All Your Own by Ilyas Ahmed

For a decade, the songs of peripatetic guitarist and singer Ilyas Ahmed have been mistaken for atmospheres. Recorded in a cloud of echo and shrouded by the distortion endemic to lo-fi equipment, Ahmed’s pieces used to feel distant, transmitted from some faraway plane and warped en route. Though "Black Midas", from his excellent 2005 debut, was a gorgeous duet for piano and guitar, the recording added enough ghostly essence for the result to imply witchcraft.

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I have spent a lot of my life being overly sentimental, almost certainly to the point of detriment. I have spent a lot of time missing things that aren’t yet gone, just knowing with a heavy level of certainty that they would leave me and then, once they do, letting that heaviness fall down and crush me, making a big deal of the mess that it leaves in its wake, and so on. And I would think that, in light of so much over-sentimentality, thickly dripping saccharine everything, I’d be the right person to assess Ilyas Ahmed’s I Am All Your Own, which makes grandiose statements in quiet ways, turning small things like slants of light and sideways glances into four and a half minutes of meaning.

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Ilyas Ahmed —I Am All Your Own (Immune)<a href="http://ilyasahmed. bandcamp. com/album/i-am-all-your-own">I Am All Your Own by Ilyas Ahmed</a>Nothing in the last century of American popular music is as familiar as the guitar.

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After three silent years, Ilyas Ahmed returns with a new tactic on the same field. The void is now warm. Or at least warmer than before: the new sounds feel more human. The fuzzy distortion highlights the fleshy agency, rather than obscuring it. To further enhance this, as if having built up a ….

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