BJ Cole and Secondson pair pedal steel with Cristal Baschet on There Is Wonder Here
The September 18 collaboration puts BJ Cole's pedal steel into a sparse electro-acoustic dialogue with one of the rarest glass-played acoustic instruments.
· Edited by Peter Luha
Credit: BJ Cole & Secondson
BJ Cole and Secondson release There Is Wonder Here on September 18, an experimental collaboration built around pedal steel guitar and the Cristal Baschet. The latter is a rare acoustic instrument sounded by rubbing tuned glass rods, giving the record an unusual dialogue between Cole's fluid pitch movement and Secondson's resonant, glass-driven textures.
The project began as a long-distance exchange before the pair worked together in the studio and brought improvisation into the final recordings. Cole's pedal steel was kept comparatively pure in the recording chain, while the Cristal Baschet was expanded with reflective spaces, accelerometers, vintage amplifiers and additional Baschet resonators.
The album moves through ambient music, minimalism, improvisation and contemporary composition without treating the pedal steel as a country-music signifier. Thomas V. Westgard recorded and engineered the sessions, with guitarist and composer Chuck Johnson handling mixing and mastering.
Credit: Bandcamp
Why it matters
This is exactly the kind of guitar-adjacent experiment easy to miss in a mainstream gear-and-rock news cycle: an influential pedal-steel player using the instrument as an open-ended contemporary voice beside a genuinely unusual acoustic sound source.
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