Acoustic guitarist John Fahey (1939-2001) was impossible to classify. His eclectic music included traditional-sounding folk pieces, Indian ragas, blues, and unpredictable modern works, not fitting securely into any specific category but somehow always sounding personal. The founder of the Takoma label (named after his hometown of Takoma Park, MD), Fahey performed instrumentals that, because of his use of space and atmosphere, hinted at New Age a couple of decades before that genre was born, but his music generally contained much more variety and expressed quite a few different moods, often unpredictably. The artist was best known for his use of the steel-string acoustic guitar and his unique, fingerstyle technique on the instrument.