Joseph Finlay: Facets
Stewart French
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Facets brings together guitarist Stewart French and composer Joseph Finlay in a body of work for solo guitar written between 2003 and 2008 and newly re-edited and remastered for 2025. The project grew from a close collaboration spanning several years and two major compositions (Lines in the Sand and It’s About Time) before expanding into a full album that explores the intersection of classical form, jazz harmony and popular idiom.
Where traditional guitar recordings often centre on repertoire or virtuosity, Facets focuses on dialogue: between composer and performer, structure and impulse, intellect and instinct. Its eight movements trace a creative exchange that still resonates — a sound-world at once reflective of its time and unexpectedly contemporary in its voice.
Stewart French Guitar
Moloco Studios, London 30-31 August 2007
23 January 2026
Facets was conceived in 2007 in a shared house in Cricklewood, North London. Composer Joseph Finlay and guitarist Stewart French were working side by side — Finlay writing by day, French returning from his office job to test new sketches through the night. What began as an experiment between friends became a dialogue about what a guitar album could be.
The pieces Finlay produced refused classification. Drawn equally from classical harmony, jazz, popular song, folk, and even country, they reflected a composer leaving behind academic modernism for something more intuitive and humane. “In a slightly naïve sense we wanted it just to be music,” he later wrote — clear melodies, rich harmonies, rhythmic complexity and a certain sly humour coexisting without hierarchy.
Each track emerged as a miniature world: the calypso brightness of Only Once; the layered counterpoint of Fleeting Release; the hypnotic clockwork of It’s About Time; the bittersweet Americana of Freedom Fries; the rain-like dissolution of All That Glitters. Heard together, they form a portrait of youth and curiosity, an album made without self-consciousness and with total conviction.
Self-released in 2008 in a small edition, Facets circulated quietly, known only to a handful of colleagues and friends. Two decades later, newly edited and remastered, it receives its first full presentation. Heard today, the album feels strikingly contemporary — its blend of clarity, rhythmic drive and emotional candour anticipating the open-border language of today’s new classical scene.
