Jeff Pearce

Jeff Pearce is an Indiana-based ambient and new age musician, known for his approach to the electric guitar. He began playing guitar at 13, and as a college student in the mid-1980s he first heard the music of Harold Budd, which stayed with him for the rest of his life. Wikipedia also notes his discovery of Brian Eno's music in those years.

His first CD, Tenderness and Fatality, came out in 1993. The six that followed focused on electric guitar alone. Later albums, including Lingering Light and Rainshadow Sky, featured compositions for the Chapman Stick, and he plays the Alto Chapman Stick. AllMusic has called him "one of the top two electronic guitarists of all time," and reviewer John Diliberto wrote in Billboard that he is "one of the best" guitarists to follow the solo electric guitar concept.

His work has drawn recognition from radio and the charts. To the Shores of Heaven and Bleed were each picked as "CD of the month" by NPR's Echoes. With Evening Above was the number one new age radio airplay album of 2014 and won Ambient Album of 2014 at the Zone Music Reporter Awards. Follow the River Home received the same ZMR award for 2016. Skies and Stars debuted at number two on Billboard's New Age chart in 2019. He has also played on two cuts of William Ackerman's Grammy-nominated recording Meditations.

Pearce is also the creator of Infinite Ambient, a listening experience in which recorded piano samples arrange and re-arrange themselves in a seemingly endless piece. He has since released music from it as one-hour albums. One of them, Autumn Light (For Harold Budd), grew from a piece he wrote on the first anniversary of Budd's passing. It is built from piano samples recorded in his own studio and played through a couple of reverbs, and he describes it as music he did not want to end.