Welp, I went into his facebook and looked at a video that was posted on September with snippets of some of the songs. This is definitely not what I'm looking for to be honest. It seems to be a lot of musical masturbation with little direction.
Damn, if you can't sell someone on some wanking on a Dream Theater forum, where can you? lol
I rarely listen to instrumental guitar music nowadays having burned out on it after so many years, but when I heard Terry's new album I was literally left in a state of shock!! I thought I had heard it all - I had NOT!
From a bit more distant perspective on this project, I'll add a bit of my story. I'm one of many guys that discovered shred at a fairly early age. In my case it was a buildup into 80s glam metal and shortly after the G3 scene by the late 90s, accompanied by learning guitar. Never put enough time into it to get that great with any semblance of alternate picking or sweeping chops, but I have an ok array of legato and tapping tricks to fool novices. By the early 00s I had dove headfirst into prog metal and power metal. They were a lot of my bread and butter listening for a number of years.
But by sometime in the late 00s I had kind of burned out on metal and instrumental or instrumentally-focused technical rock bands. I had already gotten heavily into electronic music and that stayed much more dominant for most of the 10s, with other diversions here and there. However, then in the second half of the 10s I stumbled upon a newer emerging scene of younger players that blew my mind. At the forefront was Plini, and also other guys like David Maxim Micic, Sithu Aye, Intervals, and others. They had this fascinating alchemy of blending melody and technicality in a way I'd never heard quite like that before. Since then guitar-driven instrumental music has returned as a balanced part of my listening, along with a much heavier dosage of metal again. Crazy pyrotechnics and ambient, drone-based music can coexist to scratch different listening needs, sometimes it just takes the right project to rejuvenate your interest.