Steve Tibbetts

Close is the eleventh ECM album by the Minnesota guitarist Steve Tibbetts, a twenty-part sequence of improvised melodies laid over loops, drones and rumbling percussion. "Music is a twilight language," he says. "The job is to translate some shadow into sound." The sounds are western, from distorted electric guitar to bright twelve-string acoustic, but the slow, almost hypnotic way the music unfolds points east, as it has throughout his work.

Tibbetts made the record between 2021 and 2024, working alone in his home studio in St. Paul, and recorded it himself. He plays guitars, percussion and piano. Percussionist Marc Anderson adds percussion, gongs, handpan and loops, and drummer JT Bates recorded his parts at 8vb Studio in Minneapolis. In a 2026 interview with PopMatters, Tibbetts explained that he built the album on single motifs, reused and varied. The idea came from Laura Marling's Once I Was an Eagle. He also said he had expected more electric guitar, but it "just didn't fit" except in a few places.

The music comes in suites of numbered parts, many of them under two minutes, so the album plays as one continuous piece. We Begin opens with a deep, sinuous drone and rippling twelve-string, and hand drums give its second part an earthy pulse. The third part of Somewhere is the album's slow burn, growing heavier until the guitar amplifier seems to catch fire. Remember has grittier textures and tribal rhythms, and piano brings a more nostalgic tone to its second part. "I am still reaching for the evocative sound of Sultan Khan," Tibbetts says, naming the late Indian sarangi master who has long shaped his playing.

Reviewing it for ECM Reviews in October 2025, Tyran Grillo called Close "by far the most delicate of Tibbetts's albums" and found that it speaks more directly to the heart. In Echoes and Dust in March 2026, Zachary Nathanson heard "an open-ended book with a raw energetic touch". He pointed to the sudden turn towards post-rock in the fourth part of Everywhere.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2858, released in October 2025.