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Fountain Fire is Bill MacKay's second solo album on Drag City. The Chicago-based guitarist's continued sonic journeys in conversation with himself follow a travel-worn map written in his own hand. Bill has followed the trail from familiar confines to unknown places, catalyzing a style equally enamored with the traditional and the avant-garde to make his most expansive and forceful music to date. You can hear it in the opening track; as the lava and lakes of Pre-California simmer to boiling, Bill assembles a bridge of guitars, layering beams of rumbling acoustic, distorted electric, and arcing slide parts. By leaping boldly from fixed points, he makes synergistic discoveries in mid-air. This is the MacKay writing style in its most evolved state thus far, following serpentine paths within the patterns, lunging in and out of tonality with instinctive flair and a stoic sense of inevitability, forging a sonic mosaic that breathes and grows organically as it fills the space of a song. Bill's pieces are informed by meditation and memory, impressionistic as cinematic miniatures, inspired as much by film and literary passions as by sure-playing hands, and always rooted with deep soul and steady intention. As the pieces move in and out of focus in enticingly hallucinogenic fashion, Bill throws another element into play: a pair of stark and emotionally-charged vocal numbers that cause the hair to raise on the listener's neck, etched as they are with a haunting and eerie beauty. Alongside the ever-shifting flows of instrumental colour running through Fountain Fire, the songs shine blindingly, like mirages in the desert.