This Mancunian-born and raised guitarist-composer has quite recently moved to London having studied composition and performance at Berklee in between locations. He grew up on a varying musical diet consisting initially of classical music, then rock and funk, coming to jazz a bit later on. As a musician and composer open to new approaches in getting his ideas across, Freed decided to extend the scope of the project that makes up his second album as leader to another artform and with a unique twist. The CD comes encased in a smartly designed book with six short stories written by some high profile authors such as Naomi Alderman and Colum McCann, that are based on the separate tracks written by Freed. The storytelling is absorbing while Freed's music, a lot of it through-composed, though impressively maintaining an improvised feel through a lot of it, is positioned at a crossroads between post-In a Silent Way impressionism and guitar influences that fall roughly into the Bill Frisell/Pat Metheny bracket. But there's a kind of 1970s misty mountain hippy folk-rock spirit in action here too, emphasised by the Polish London-based violin specialist Alice Zawadski's quite eerie wordless vocals.