During the 1960s, Basho made a string of records for the Takoma label, which was founded by John Fahey. Both men played acoustic guitar and came up on the East Coast folk scene before moving to California. But while each musician made essentially solitary music that used sound and words to externalize the convolutions of their idiosyncratic psyches, they were profoundly different. Fahey’s ingenious instrumentals linked blues and bluegrass techniques to classical compositional ideas, and he often accompanied them with manifestly absurd liner notes that contained critiques of his social circle and the world at large. Basho’s music synthesized gleanings from and imaginations of music from other cultures to realize an escape from that same world into a realm of transcendent wonder, whose dimensions were made explicit by spectacularly supple vocalizations.