Scottish classical guitarist Sean Shibe has been digging into some seriously unusual repertoire over the past few years, perhaps most notably on his SoftLOUD album from 2018 which split the difference between pieces for the electric guitar (including an excellent performance of Steve Reich’s classic Electric Counterpoint), and Scottish lute pieces. This is his second CD for Pentatone, after his previous recital Camino that included the music of composers like Federico Mompou and Francis Poulenc.

Here Shibe has really pushed out the boat, and I suspect it’s not going to be to all tastes. He presents an electric-guitar-only recital that he describes by saying that we might imagine the album to be “something like an overflowing toybox… but what appears to be child’s play portends something darker and ecstatic, particularly when rendered through the post-modern chaos of the electric guitar”. The repertoire leaps from Hildegard von Bingen to Chick Corea and Bill Evans, from outsider composer Moondog to Messiaen and Meredith Monk, and that’s without mentioning the younger composers here, too.

What caught my ear, though, was Shibe’s sometimes rather self-conscious performance of these works as electric pieces. One of the fantastic...