Track Listing

1. Aerial Boundaries
2. Bensusan
3. Rickover's Dream
4. Ragamuffin
5. After The Gold Rush
6. Hot Type
7. Spare Change
8. Menage A Trois
9. The Magic Farmer

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #28783 in Music
• Released on: 1990-10-25
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.com essential recording
It's been called the album that opened "a new chapter on steel-string guitar playing," and it's unquestionably one of the most groundbreaking albums in acoustic guitar history. Though Hedges had released the excellent Breakfast in the Field on Windham Hill in 1981, the Grammy-nominated Boundaries came as an unexpected revelation in 1985. On stirring, complex compositions like "Rickover's Dream," "Spare Change," and a deft instrumental reading of Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush," Hedges unleashed a stunning new vocabulary of finger-tapping, hammering, and harmonic slaps--processed with electronics and reverb--that still resounds today in the playing of artists from Ani Di Franco to Preston Reed. Steeped both in classical harmony and the fingerstyle guitar tradition of Leo Kottke, Martin Carthy, and John Renbourn, Boundaries remains the late composer-guitarist's seminal work, and its innovations in technique, tuning, tone, and intensity remain key texts in modern acoustic circles. --James Rotondi

Customer Reviews

Glad to come back to this after many years
Michael Hedges was a truly extraordinary player. He also personified New Age-y-ness in a good, real, and human way. If you put aside the stereotype, he was really working to live a good life in the way that he wanted to. I saw him play several times in Nashville and then in California, in the early 1990s. When he came to Stanford and played with Michael Manring, it was one of the best concerts of my life. He was in a great mood, energized, and absolutely blew the crowd away. Then there were quieter moments; for example he recited the Jabberwocky whilst walking, hunched down, with his elbows wrapped behind his knees and his hands also on the floor (playing a borogove?--see the cover of Road to Return). His covers, like Drive Me Crazy by Fine Young Cannibals, or Lucky Star by Madonna started out like a bit of tongue in cheek, but they became rocking, gleeful, pyrotechnic liberation.

Aerial Boundaries is wonderful. Other albums are definitely worthwhile, or if you want to get a couple of mp3's where he's doing great guitar, try Silent Anticipations (off of Breakfast in the Field or Live on the Double Planet) or The Rootwitch (off Taproot), or Jitterboogie (off Oracle, and not avail. as mp3 on Amazon I think).

I was really bummed when Michael Hedges died in a car wreck, tumbling alone off of California's coastal Highway 1. I think I had this album on CD along time ago, or cassette, but it's lost. I'm finally coming back to buy it again today.

The Best!!
Micheal Hedges lived to please his listeners with the best possible music that he could get from a guitar!!

Aerial Boundaries
Great CD if you enjoy acoustic guitar. Sophiscated, romantic,ethereal, and abstract all rolled into a ball. Good stuff!