On her new solo LP, guitarist Ava Mendoza takes you on a personal journey down rusted railways of distorted solos, passionate vocals and elemental reimaginings of the blues.

Mendoza is unquestionably one of today’s most unique and unconventional guitar goddesses, blazing her own path between the worlds of jazz, rock and the avant-garde, on jaw-dropping solo releases, and works with the likes of William Parker, Carla Bozulich and Fred Frith, as well as a member of the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet. On The Circular Train, the Brooklyn-based artist weaves a detailed travelogue of her own past, her ancestral homelands and the worlds of her friends and inspirations, through her angular guitar gymnastics alone.

With grungy, fuzzed-up solo guitar lines that bounce and bend into a myriad of unexpected directions, Mendoza paints vivid scenes of the mines in Montana and Bolivia that her ancestors once worked and called home, the places in the Amazon River where she swam with her father amongst pods of pink dolphins and the scrubby floodplains of the Mississippi Delta. Much like Neil Young’s arid score for Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, you can just feel and hear the chugging of a great train rumbling you through vast ever-shifting landscapes that roll past your window, all through Mendoza’s raw guitar work.

If the deconstructed blues of Captain Beefheart and the abstract virtuosity of Wendy Eisenberg catch your ear as much as the power guitar of the likes of Erica Dawn Lyle or Marissa Patternoster, then this is a record you must become deeply familiar with. Check it out here.

-KH