Norman Records on Future Overtones:
"Ah, some excellent summer vibes flowing from the speakers courtesy of Glasgow-based artist and musician Alec Cheer. These are solo guitar recordings that range from pure stripped back acoustic playing through to more textured soundscapes, drones and ambient guitar vibes. Lovely stuff and a great soundtrack to staring into the bright blue summer sky on a hazy summers evening, with a cold one in hand. Hand numbered edition of 50 copies in unique painted and stamped sleeve with wraparound cover."
No Monsters Review in the Wire Magazine:
"Field recordings and shortwave radio generate grainy clouds, seeded with piano and acoustic guitar. The sense of purpose and patience makes it clear Crosbie and Cheer are not simply approaching drone as a form of stasis but are dedicated to the long view, luxuriating in slowly unfolding ideas. As JG Ballard was able to look at a snapshot of a reclining nude and, in his imagination, elongate the soft surfaces into a rolling desert landscape, so you get the impression that these sonic vistas could be the perfect pop song strectched out into sublime perspective." - Daniel Spicer
EARlabs on Cluny to the Sea:
"At EARlabs we do not often write about pop and folk music. Our experience is not really on a high level in that field of music. Though, for Cuny To The Sea by the Scottish musician Cheer we make an exception. This because Cheer knows to combine these two genres with a more experimental approach.
Cheer is the project of musician Alec Cheer who has so far released 2 albums on Benbecula Records. Cluny To The Sea is his first recording for Distance Recordings recorded live to minidisc with no overdubs, while on holiday in a small fishing village in the north of Scotland.
On this release Cheer plays guitar and some random objects to create small loops. Most of the songs are solely based on loops building and layering up. Nowhere the songs stay on a nice path, showing no dynamic outbursts or strange drifts of experimentalism. The music Cheer creates doesn't need that. For some songs, though, he seems to make a small exception. The guitar is sometimes used to create soft droning sounds or a violin is setup to slightly disturb the whole scene. These moments give that small twist to this album that is needed to keep everything interesting enough to keep turning back for more.
Cluny To The Sea has become a nice album that fits very well on a sunny afternoon in the garden drifting away in a daydream. Don't hesitate to get this release and put it on your ipod."
Smallfish on Red Walk:
"Following on from the absolutely gorgeous Benbecula Minerals Series CD we had from Alec Cheer last year comes this simply divine offering on London's Drifting Falling label. As a solo guitar album it's really quite exquisite and there's a wonderful balance between catchy, lightly folky instrumental numbers and a more sculptural, processed sound. That, for me, is really where this CD hits its stride... the longer, more densely constructed pieces are absolutely beautiful and really bring to mind the looped, hypnotic sound of artists such as Windy and Carl or even - possibly more pertinently - Jasper Leyland or Mole Harness. Whichever way you look at it, this CD is just brilliant and comes with a very high recommendation indeed."
Norman Records on Red Walk:
"On the same label and not dissimilar we have Cheer with Red Walk. It instantly sounds more experimental with building sounds behind the finger picked acoustic guitar. The guitars Chime in a James Blackshaw style with many over dubbed guitar lines creating quite a hypnotic medieval trance like moment. Be good for ear phones this one as its got the stereo nicely working. No singing this time. The whole of Normans has just voiced its approval of this. He also uses his guitar to create ambient soundscapes. very very nice indeed."
Static Traps review in the Wire Magazine:
"Glaswegian Alex Cheer's contribution to the Benbecula label's monthly Minerals series of releases is a beguiling collection of chiming guitar instrumentals and drifting half-melodies channelled through fuzzy drone soundscapes and benign electronic ruptures. Cheer's bareboned guitar style is a kind of post-electronica folk picking, where clarity gives way to Ambient noise or collides gently with fluttering tape manipulation and processed found sound. Certain tracks fall clearly in one camp or the other; either melodic neo-folk pieces or sparser, drifting tonal workouts. But Cheer is also able to deftly navigate between the two, sometimes integrating them in subtle combinations of crystalline clarify and blurry abstraction. The style here isn't really riveting or overtly dramatic, but is more about subtle shading and leaving a gentler, but lingering impression."
Static Traps in The Skinny:
"If you like the clicks, decay, silences and surface noise of music then Benbecula have something truly special for you. Cheer creates a faultless balance of textures in his sound, utilising gentle plucked guitar, counter-pointed with what sounds like the dying milliseconds of feedback looped over and over. But equally important to the pieces is that he employs a similar ethos to the likes of minimal techno godhead Ricardo Villalobos or artists on the sadly defunct Mille Plateaux label; on the surface, it may seem like 'simple' repetition - in this case of his treated guitar - but listen deeper and there is a turbulent mix of crackles, drones and pulses that becomes infinitely absorbing. On listening, you'll suddenly become aware, 3 tracks in, that you've stopped what it is you are doing, and that you're sitting very very still in order to hear every last minute sound. Microscopically brilliant. "