In the new edition of the always interesting Yeti magazine, there’s a good and provocative piece about Jack Rose and the Black Twig Pickers, in which the author Justin Farrar calls out “All the shaggy indie hippies and underground freakers out there dabbling in Appalachian folk, country music and roots rock.”
Somewhat belatedly, I’ve just got round to reading Alex Ross’ fantastic book on 20th Century composition, The Rest Is Noise. A lot to talk about in there, but one quote stuck out yesterday. “Back in 1915,” Ross writes, “the critic Van Wyck Brooks had complained that America was caught in a false dichotomy between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’, between ‘academic pedantry and pavement slang’. He called for a middle-ground culture that would fuse intellectual substance with communicative power.”
There was allegedly a leak of the new Dirty Projectors album a couple of days ago, which means that yet again my dithering has robbed me of blogging exclusivity. The thing is, as I’ve mentioned a few times over the past month, I’ve been finding “Bitte Orca”, like its predecessors, somewhat intriguing and uncrackable. Today, I think I’m getting closer to understanding it.
Another follow-up on a request this morning: a grapple with the great reverberant sprawl of “RTZ”, two CDs of Six Organs Of Admittance’s early work and marginalia.
Coming up to the end of the year, it occurs to me that there are a few records that have been kicking around my desk and home for a while now, getting a fair bit of play and love, but not much attention here.
It begins with a flutter of guitar, a dusting of cymbals. Then a female, faintly ethereal vocal arrives, accompanied by bells. At first, it sounds like she might be distant kin to the acid folk scene which still percolates away in the US; there’s a very vague resemblance to Meg Baird and Espers, perhaps. But then again, she’s not singing in English, and there’s something discreetly exotic about the song, “Dawn Over The Clouds”.
Thanks for all your half-year Top Tens; some interesting choices there, as well as The Charlatans. Keep them coming, and I’ll do some kind of dark mathematics and rustle up a collective Wild Mercury Sound chart next week.
If the internet is to be trusted, the guitarist Peter Walker has not played a gig in the UK since 1962. In the interim, he has befriended Karen Dalton, Sandy Bull and Janis Joplin, provided instrumental accompaniment for Dr Timothy Leary’s early LSD experiments, learned the art of raga from Ravi Shankar in the same class as George Harrison, and spent nearly four decades in a truck in Woodstock, chiefly practising flamenco guitar.
I'm just playing an old record by the great folk/psych/raga guitarist Peter Walker, who has recently returned to action after nearly 40 years of, as far as I can tell from a quick circuit round the internet, practising flamenco guitar. Amazingly, Walker - one of the few survivors of John Fahey's generation of American primitives, and the man who provided musical accompaniment to Timothy Leary's early experiments - is playing just down the road from me in Dalston, North-East London tonight.
