A throbbing, low-end drone is wedded to country-style finger picking and overlaid with a layer of slashing, feedback-laden scratches. An acoustic guitar joins in to duel in good-ole-boy fashion. The strings are slashed — once, twice, three times. The song ends. But what’s this? Is it a band of funky techno-geeks, or an experiment from the backwoods of North Carolina gone wrong? In fact, all the sounds on this remarkable album are made by one man, Bernard Falaise, and they’re all made on electric and acoustic guitar, with no synthesizers or sample~s. Falaise, a member of Klaxon Gueule and Avatar, has produced a tour de force on his first solo album, a wide-screen presentation in a series of miniatures of the possibilities of one man, several guitars and as much processing as they can be subjected to The use of stereo effects and the overall sound quality make this a perfect headphone album. 4. 5