Kevin Farge is a songwriter and visual artist who was born in Houston, Texas, and moved to his stepmother’s native Costa Rica at age eight, where he learned to speak Spanish and surf. The family eventually settled down back in Houston. Farge has spent the past several years living in the same small beach town in Costa Rica that he visited as a child. Low Tide, Kevin Farge’s first full-length LP for Very Jazzed, showcases his unique melodic storytelling for solo guitar. Sounding more like the spare, alchemical songs by Six Organs of Admittance, the Jewelled Antler Collective, or Loren Connors, Farge charts a unique path through a solo guitar world otherwise dominated by guitarists imitating the style of John Fahey. Kevin Farge’s songs are not long, aimless American Primitive ragas. Rather, Farge’s guitar speaks, in an alarming variety of nuggety little gems that each get straight to the point, with time lengths more similar to Brazilian guitarists like Luiz Bonfá and João Gilberto. Taken as a whole, Low Tide collects things found along the beach at low tide – wind, pelicans, a mast, waves as seen from a variety of angles (above and below water), cold spray, dry grass, a bag of rice cakes. At turns haunting and forlorn, at others bright, tender and beautiful, the album feels grown, not constructed; like it has accumulated over time, sand piled high on the beach. All Kevin Farge had to do was go and pluck it from the reef at low tide.