The guitar is a two-headed beast. In its civilised, classical form it is the instrument of the concert hall. Yet there’s also its wild, electric cousin. Plugged into a wall of amplifiers and cranked up to the max, the guitar is capable of unleashing ear-splitting cacophony. Never the twain shall meet? Well, Sean Shibe has already given us his imaginatively programmed ‘softLOUD’ (Delphian, A/18), and now Miloš Karadaglic´ offers something quite different. Miloš has been on something of a mission in recent years to bring these seemingly incompatible sides of the guitar’s character closer together, and while this doesn’t necessarily mean forming a rock band or playing Jimi Hendrix, it has involved a process whereby he has sought to appropriate repertoire that has remained largely the preserve of the electric guitar.

‘Blackbird’ (Mercury, 3/16), contained some beautiful renditions by Miloš of songs by The Beatles. However, almost every moment demonstrated that the transition from pop to classical on that album was a relatively straightforward one. ‘The Sound of Silence’ is more ambitious in that it casts its net much wider, drawing on rock repertoire that is distinctly less classical-sounding. It’s a recipe that works well at times. Miloš faithfully renders the vocal line from Portishead’s ‘Sour Times’ to gently pulsing string pizzicatos and floating piano figurations. Plangent thirds add colour to a similarly atmospheric version of The Magnetic Fields’ ‘The Book of Love’, while hemiola-like patterns add character to Skylar Grey’s folksy ‘Moving Mountains’ and Dido’s ‘Life for Rent’. The chamber-style setting also serves to foreground the simplicity of these arrangements. In comparison, standard pop arrangements featured here, such as Paul Simon’s ‘The Sound of Silence’, Leonard Cohen’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ or The Moody Blues’ ‘Nights in White Satin’ fare less well, sounding altogether more clichéd and predictable.

With the focus very much on the songs themselves, it’s easy to lose sight of the sound of Miloš’s guitar, especially when it takes a back seat in arrangements such as in Radiohead’s ‘Street Spirit’. Perhaps with this in mind, the remaining tracks on the album focus on the kind of standard classical guitar core repertoire that propelled Miloš into the limelight in the first place, such as Francisco Tárrega’s ‘Oremus’ and ‘Endecha’ (to which he imparts an attractive dancelike twist) or Pujol’s ‘Milonga’, where one senses that the musically omnivorous Montenegrin guitarist remains at his most comfortable and assured.