This week's round-up demonstrates the enormous variety of what we call, for want of a better term, folk music.

Mike Golay, Across the Bridge and Half Pint (solo acoustic guitar)

Fans of the acoustic guitar, get thee to thy record store and pick up one or both of these CDs from six-string master Mike Golay. Virtuosic but not flashy, soothing but not new-age precious or background-music boring (although they've been serving as excellent relaxing background music for me in my office), Golay's pieces express the soul of the often taken-for-granted instrument.

One can hear Hawaiian strains and Celtic touches here and there, and many of the titles are evocative or quirky ("111 Archer Avenue," "Somewhere I Have Never Travelled," "Baby With a Hammer"), but overall the music is a-cultural, its language the universal tongue of plucked strings. Some songs are more melodic, others more atmospheric, and Golay will throw in an unexpected bend or chromatic line in places. But there's not a sour note to be heard.

Though both CDs are thoughtful and the songs varied, the more recent Across the Bridge is perhaps the more contemplative of the two. It's also longer, so if quantity is your goal and your budget allows for only one solo acoustic guitar album, go for that one. If you can't get enough acoustic guitar, get both. You can sample the tracks at CD Baby (or iTunes, though as yet it has only Half Pint) before you buy.

This style of music doesn't get a whole lot better. Highly recommended.

Irina Rivkin, upwelling

Although we are in a richly creative time marked by cross-pollination of musical styles and traditions, this CD stands out as something really different. In a mere 36 minutes Irina Rivkin pulls together aesthetic, emotional, political, sexual, and social justice themes into a contiguous and unique artistic statement. Despite the coffee cups in the cover photo, Rivkin's work is very far from the "lesbian coffeehouse music" that I anticipated. Instead it's a kind of world-folk spawned from the artist's Russian folk-music background and acute sensitivity to personal and political injustice, and informed by a crossover-jazz sensibility a la Leonard Bernstein and a mildly experimental bent akin to that of Kate Bush or Meredith Monk.