John Fahey - City of Refuge

In investigating Fahey's late period, I'm sympathetic with the fact that he felt dead-ended stylistically and was struggling to move beyond his signature American Primitive tropes into something a bit more...different and new.  The issue seems to be just what, precisely, that new direction is, and Fahey's frustration is evident in the music.

In spite of its recording date, City of Refuge most resembles 60's Fahey records like Volume 6: Days Have Gone By and Requia, with equal space and volume given to acoustic guitar and field recordings, found sounds and electronic sound sources.  As with those other recordings, this approach either stands (Days Have Gone By) or falls (Requia, often) on how well those elements mesh with one another compositionally.  The disc starts promisingly enough with "Fanfare," which sees an unusually (for Fahey) overdriven slide guitar layered on top of droning, industrial electronic sounds not unlike those produced by Keith Rowe, especially in his solo works.  As the tracks play on, for me the impression builds that the compositions aren't very well thought-out, which is a serious stumbling block for an artist whose greatest strength is arguably his ability as a longform composer, not as an improvisor, which is what he appears to attempt on "The Mill Pond" and large portions of "City of Refuge I," plucking single notes against a throbbing background drone.  While the proposition of a more spare approach to his guitar style is intriguing, the results here don't feel particularly well-realized.

Elsewhere we are suddenly jolted out of the avant-garde soundworld back into more traditional Fahey territory, with guitar-only excursions like "Chelsey Silver, Please Come Home," and the dirge-like "City of Refuge III."  The former hints at a new compositional twist on Fahey's slide style, with abrupt stops and rhythmic interruptions, but again it feels like he didn't thoroughly integrate the idea into the piece, or maybe it wasn't an idea after all and the performance is just choppy!  Both songs seem to lack distinctive melodies or a feel other than "Fahey filler"--pleasant enough, but by 1997 we know what this man is capable of!  To my ears, "Hope Slumbers Eternal" is the best-realized piece on the album, blending a droning background that relates tonally to the minor slide guitar melody it accompanies, provoking an eerie, meditative atmosphere--most importantly, the electronics and guitar seem to combine coherently, which is mostly not the case with the rest of the experiments here.  The album closes with the 19-minute "On the Death and Disembowelment of the New Age," which, as far as I can tell, contains no guitar (though it does keep alive Fahey's tradition of humorously long and barbed song titles).  It's probably the most successful sound collage on the disc, but sitting at the end of a selection of noodly acoustic guitar pieces, it raises questions about what it's doing here, and why these songs all belong on the same album.  There is some cool rhythmic phasing of a tambourine-like sound that kicks in around the 12-minute mark and lasts for several minutes, and the album closes like it opened, with a classic Fahey field recording motif--a lonely locomotive whistle. 

This is the kind of album that really gets under my skin--not because I think it's bad, but because there's a palpable sense of frustration from an artist with specific ideas and a seeming incapability to fully realize them.  Probably more troubling to me personally is Fahey's frustrated attempt to break beyond his established vocabulary as a guitarist--for a man who reportedly described fingerpicking as a "disease," he must have felt more than a little trapped.  When an artist verges into atonal and pure sound territories, success seems to become as ephemeral as the compositional building blocks are abstract.  I find it daunting to explore these areas as the measure of artistic success depends even more on an unquantifiable gut reaction, and the difference between good and bad is painfully difficult to control as a composer--but perhaps that's where the adventure lies!  My next stop for late-era Fahey is another 1997 album, Womblife.  While my hopes for a successful application of his challenging ideas are tentative, even unsuccessful attempts in this territory are rewarding and always thought-provoking.

Get it here.

Supersilent - 1

Though I've written a fair bit about free improvisation, I've only written about a couple of groups (mostly AMM and related artists).  Here's something different from a more recent group from Norway called Supersilent.  1 is the first disc of their 1997 debut 1-3, which I've decided (after no small deliberation) to break up into three parts to review despite the fact that the albums are all grouped (like each of Supersilent's numbered releases) in one single-colored package and since each disc is over an hour long.  While it took my ears a while to grow accustomed to the synth-heavy sounds on these albums (I'm used to the comparatively organic sounds of groups like AMM), the music here has eventually become the kind of paradoxically noisy brain relaxant that I've come to look for in the best free improv.

The fact that Supersilent's music is related to free jazz is immediately apparent here--"1.1" opens with 2:30 of drums before the first synth statement.  The drummer's jazz chops is probably one of my favorite aspects about the group's sound--often the longer tracks come down to layering extended synth tones over the top of the kit sounds, which keep things interesting and remind us that there are indeed humans making this music.  The first track also demonstrates the group's interest in both sampling wordless vocals and throwing a little bit of trumpet into the mix, which deepens the connection to free jazz (though the trumpeter's chops aren't especially jazzy).  Things also get satisfyingly twitchy in the first track's second half and in "1.2" when repeating bass synth tones start to contrast the drum beats. 

"1.3" shows the group's interest in both treated sounds (with synths that undergo brilliant changes in timbre and texture) and the power of volume, with densely layered soundscapes made of shrieking synths and pounding drums.  I like how the group manages to keep things kinetic in these places--it's the judgment to ensure an energetic beat (no matter how fractured or buried by abrasive sounds) that (for me) separates this noise from just anybody out there with a keyboard and a big amp.  The final track, "1.4" finds the group toying much more with dynamics, using a repeating minor trumpet melodic motif as a backbone and running past it with a series of percussion and comparatively gentle synth improvisations.  Though the band rarely manages to use silence as an effective tool on this disc, the shift in volume dynamics is a welcome and arguably necessary one (if you're going to try and make it through all three discs at once!).  The melodic fragment is effective but repetitive and predicts the group's later, much tamer forays into more melodic, tonally-anchored improvisations.  While it's definitely a more accessible sound, I prefer the group's more distinctive and energetic early work, but I understand that it sure must be tough to try and achieve success playing such harsh-sounding music.  6 seems to be the group's most popular release, but I appreciate the edge that's present here on their earlier material, which inhabits a niche in the free improv realm that I haven't heard anyone else quite fill.

Get it here.