So here's how the story goes: some time in the early '80s, steel-string guitar legend John Fahey met up with a young kid who could not only play like him, but write music like Fahey's, too. Most well-known musicians run into this, and it generally turns into something either embarrassing or ugly. However, the mercurial Fahey seems to have avoided this mare's nest altogether and taken the young Charlie Schmidt on as a sort of stunt-double -- letting him record an entire album as Fahey, and even getting Schmidt to write a letter, again impersonating his mentor, to Fahey's current girlfriend. Was Fahey messing with Schmidt's head? Was he messing with everyone else's? All that seems certain is that Schmidt sounded an awful lot like his idol, and his idol was one righteously strange dude.

It's now over twenty years since that first meeting, and Charlie Schmidt has come out with a record all his own... well, almost. The shadow of his mentor stretches long and spectral over Xanthe Terra, named after the enormous, asteroid-pocked region of the Martian landscape. Like Fahey, Schmidt's take on American Primitive and the blues is alienating -- it sounds as though it were being played by an extraterrestrial virtuoso hell-bent on reinventing the genre using only passages from Stravinsky, Flatt and Scruggs, Django Reinhardt and Sabicas.

For fans of Fahey and avant-acoustic guitar, there is much to delight in Xanthe Terra. The compositions are brooding, always mutating, yet captivating. Schmidt's take on Fahey's "Dance of the Inhabitants of the Palace of King Phillip XIV of Spain" is a blazing rendition, while "The Hyattsville Anti-Inertia Dance" (apparently named by Fahey) is simultaneously dark, comforting and pretty. In fact, the same could be said for almost every song on the album. The only track that doesn't quite hang together is "Slavic Mountain", which interpolates Grieg's Peer Gynt over several heavy-handed punch-ins that make the piece sound like an accidental suite.

It's possible to take Xanthe Terra as an homage to a great and strange musician, or as a long-overdue debut by a man who is a talented musician in his own right. Either way, the album can't help but impress.