Since 2011, James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg have made three records of guitar duets, although they would have done at least twice as many with more time and proximity and fewer children, other collaborations, and solo projects between them. Their most recent album, “All Gist,” was released by the Paradise of Bachelors label in 2024 and, in 2025, the pair managed to perform together at the inaugural Sound & Gravity festival in Chicago—their first appearance in a decade.

English-born, Chicago-based Elkington is a composer, producer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who has toured with Tortoise, Jeff Tweedy, Brokeback, and Eleventh Dream Day, and produced records for Jake Xerxes Fussell, Steve Gunn and Joan Shelley. His two solo albums leaned into the bucolic folk-song of his native country, but 2023’s Me Neither and the follow-up Pastel De Nada are instead collections of improvisatory miniatures and incidental observations, reflecting his interest in library and soundtrack music.

Salsburg released the first of his eight solo albums in 2011. Since then he’s quietly established a style marked by a depth and a complexity wholly his own, drawing on abiding interests in minimalism, rural American vernacular music, and the work of British folk revivalists like Dick Gaughan, Dolly Collins, and Nic Jones. He’s a frequent collaborator of songwriter-singer Joan Shelley (his wife) and has contributed to recordings by Shirley Collins, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, the Weather Station, and Jake Xerxes Fussell, among others. For nearly 20 years Salsburg served as curator of the digital Alan Lomax Archive.