After another extended break (which has become a trademark), guitarist Steve Tibbetts returns to ECM with Life Of, his eighth album for the label in 36 years.

Breaking with his own precedent, this is his second acoustic offering in a row following 2010's Natural Causes.

That said, aside from recording with his 12-string Martin guitar and a piano, and mixing in the concert hall of Macalester College, the two projects have an altogether different feel.

The music on the former has a more active, nearly ritualistic feel.

Life Of is more basic, stripped down, and less pronounced.

The guitar is a skeletal tone generator, a gateway with a nearly obsessive sense of economy.

Tibbetts is seemingly much more concerned with the music's illustration of its own process than in making a statement.

The sound world that exists inside his vintage Martin (or "concert hall," as he describes it) is framed with fingerpicked chords across its almost flat fretboard, bent single-string vibratos, quietly articulated piano playing, and painstakingly edited field recordings from his far Eastern travels.

Added to the subtle percussion from Marc Anderson and occasional cello drones and pedals from Michelle Kinney, they serve the purpose of drawing the listener into a vast, suggestive, yet blurry world that exists between the physical one and the more nebulous, spiritual body of sound.