The Basement Rug

I found this interesting gem at the Midas Mart in Meaford, Ontario. The LP packaging was a bit obtuse, but this only piqued my interest more. The back cover contained a mix of French and English titles, which is not unheard of in Canada, except that the record was issued on the Wabana label out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Even more confusing is the Wabana label itself, which uses the stamp of the long defunct Dom. Wabana Ore Limited of Newfoundland. According to Artefacts Canada:

The miner’s brass safety tag is a round piece of brass that was used by the mining company to keep track of the miners in the mines. Each Miner’s Brass was engraved with “Dom. Wabana Ore Limited, Wabana NFLD” and its own ID number [the Wabana label uses id 2556]. There is also a hole at the top of the brass and a small slit at the bottom, so the tags could be hung on a board while the miners were inside the mine. Upon leaving the mine for the day, each miner was required to take their own tag, and if at the end of the day someone’s tag was not removed, the company would know that the miner was still in the mine somewhere.

Perhaps there is a tragic folk tale behind miner 2556? As it turns out, ABBC stands for the names of the artists involved: Naïm Amor, Thomas Belhom, Joey Burns and John Convertino. ABBC is a colaboration of the Amor Belhom Duo and the Tucson band, Calexico. It turns out that Calexico played The Phoenix Concert Theatre in Toronto on Tuesday, 18 November 2008 - just 4 days before I bought this album for a mere 25 cents!

The album itself is experimental pop that crosses ambient, folk, and country, with some of the best minimalist DIY production I have ever heard. As this album is an excellent example of why we need to support independent labels (and because it is still available), I am only going to offer up one track - the haunting Gilbert, hoping that this will encourage you to go out and buy the LP or CD from Sure Fire Distribution.

I can hear a lot of potential influences hidden in the powerful mood of Gilbert: Pink Floyd, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, and The Violent Femmes.

The album release information below comes from the SureFireDistribution.com:

Amor / Belhom / Burns / Convertino
Tête à Tête
CD Wabana ORE24
November 2000

During the recording of CALEXICO’s Spoke album in 1996 at their homes in Tucson, Arizona, JOEY BURNS and JOHN CONVERTINO were introduced to two French musicians, NAIM AMOR and THOMAS BELHOM through a mutual friend, French filmmaker MARIANNE DISSARD, who directed the GIANT SAND documentary Drunken Bees. At that time, the four musicians hit it off and began the first of many recording sessions that eventually would lead to the making of Tête à Tête.

In 1997, Naïm and Thomas moved to Tucson and began playing regularly in town as AMOR BELHOM DUO, often sharing bills with John and Joey. This soon led to more recording sessions, an extension of the two duos’ improvising and collaborating on stage. The majority of the Tête à Tête recordings were done at the homes of Burns/Convertino, live on 2, 4 and 8 track. The remainder of the album was recorded at Waterworks Studio in Tucson by Jim Waters. Due to Calexico’s busy tour schedule after the release of The Black Light, the making of Tête à Tête spans over a 15 month period. Beside the two duos, the album features German musician, MARTIN WENK, who played in Calexico’s European touring ensemble and Marianne Dissard on vocals.

John and Joey have been playing together for 9 years, having first met in Giant Sand. They continue working with Howe Gelb and their other side project, OP8. Over the years, John and Joey have collaborated with various artists (Victoria Williams, Richard Buckner, Barbara Manning, Rainer Ptacek, Vic Chesnutt [who was featured in this Basement Rug compilation]. After the release of The Black Light in 1998 on QUARTERSTICK RECORDS, the duo toured both Europe and the US, alongside The Dirty Three, Pavement, Vic Chesnutt and Lambchop. As a result of their increased exposure in Europe, they have been asked to contribute in a number of international projects (Jean-Louis Murat, Holland’s VPRO Moondive Project with Correo Aereo, Pablo Nahar,De Dijk,Ponda O’Brien, DJ Graham B).

Naïm and Thomas met over 10 years ago in Paris, first playing in French hardcore band WITCHES VALLEY (Extreme Return to the Source). From 1992 to 1997, they belonged to GENERATION CHAOS (Citoyens En France), an experimental musical and theatrical avant-garde political activist group, performing with contemporary music percussionist/composer Jean-Charles François (director of UCSD music school from 1972 to 1986) and stage director Marc O’. Their first album as Amor Belhom Duo, Wavelab Performance, was recorded in their new city of residence, Tucson, in 1998 and features guest performances by John and Joey.

This post is dedicated to Canadian composer Eldon Rathburn, who died in Ottawa on 30 August 2008. Rathburn composed Labyrinthe for a special National Film Board of Canada pavilion at Expo-67.

Liner notes about the Labyrinth:

Outside a 5-storey windowless structure, one of the many architectureal features of Expo ‘67, a long queue of visitors waits patiently, sometimes for hours in the rain, to gain admittance to the Labyrinth.

Why this magnetic appeal?

It is a unique blend of film images, architecture, music and sound effects, and each of these is its own attraction. But more than the dazzle of a complex film presentation, of brilliant stereophonic sound, and a of powerful architecture, is the fascination of the theme, for the emotions generated by the whole experience taken together inevitably lead the visitor to a mysterious search - to a journey into himself.

As in the labyrinths of antiquity, with their winding corridors, dead ends, and menacing minotaur, their puzzling search for the one way out, the visitor is set off through a symbolic maze of life. In theatres unlike any built before, from images, and sounds gathered around the world, emerges the cycle of every man’s life: his entry into the world, his energies and aspirations, his confidence and uncertainty, his sufferings and his sacrafices, the desolation of death and the ever-renewed promise of birth.

The movement of the audience through the physical structure is an integral part of the experience. As one enters, an almost ceremonial procession through the shadowy winding corridors, accompanied by haunting music, prepares the senses and the mind for what is to come. In the breath-taking first theatre the audience gazes from eight balconies onto a long narrow screen far below on the floor and onto a similarly elongated vertical screen on the wall ahead. Here are played out life’s first hopes, and its first great disillusionments.

Next one proceeds to “The Maze”, a complex of twisting aisles, thousands of tiny sparkling coloured lights mirrored into infinity, and electronically prepared music, all forming an interlude which suggests as yet undiscovered resources in one’s inner life.

In the third and last chamber five film screens arranged in the form of a cross confront the visitor. On them an interplay of pictures as different ordinary film as poetry from prose, tells of man’s necessary confrontation with the dark aspects of his own nature, and his consequent release into a world in which, even though he is called on to give up everything, he finally finds the peace and happiness he has spent his life seeking.

From the last quiet image of a sea-scape accompanied by a tranquil face carved into stone, the viewer exits onto a balcony over-looking the broad sweep of the St. Lawrence River, to face the reality of his own particular world again.

Through Eldon Rathburn’s vivid, evocative music, and other elements of the sound track, all superbly recorded and specially prepared for this unique phonogrpahic experience, this record recreates the many moods of the Labyrinth.

The production was hailed by TIME magazine as proof that cinema “has just begun to explore its boundaries and possibilities”. It used 35mm and 70mm film projected simultaneously on five screens in a cross formation and was the precursor of today’s IMAX format. Shortly after Expo-67, co-director Roman Kroitor left the National Film Board of Canada to co-found Multi-Screen Corporation, which later became IMAX Corporation.

The Labyrinth building at Expo-67 consisted of three main chambers: Theatre One, which ran two 70mm projectors in a unique floor-and-end-wall combination; The Maze, an apparently limitless series of mirrors and red “grain-of-wheat” bulbs; and Theatre Three, which projected five simulataneous 35mm projections in a cross formation.

In 1979, the NFB re-issued In the Labyrinth in a single-screen format. In May 2007, the NFB and the Cinémathèque Québécoise presented an exhibition at the Labyrinth pavilion, marking the 40th anniversary of Expo 67.

Descriptions of the Labyrinthe experience from the 7 July 1967 edition of TIME magazine:

In the vaulted chambers of a windowless, five-story building, the viewer follows a restatement of the Greek myth of Theseus, who entered a labyrinth on the island of Crete to slay the monstrous Minotaur. In the pavilion the labyrinth is evoked by a series of eerie corridors and chambers, including one auditorium where audiences peer down from galleries on a swimming pool-sized screen. At the same time, an oblong screen, 38 ft. high, confronts them at eye level. Sometimes Labyrinth uses the two screens to show off: a girl on the far screen throws a bit of bread away; it lands with a splash on the shimmering pond of the bottom screen. Most often it is employed to generate vertigo, as when a trapeze artist dangles above a crowd, or when two men have a highball-to-highball confrontation with a swiveling stripper.

Sonic Boon. Another chamber shows five screens arranged in the shape of a cross. In the most effective sequence, an African hunter peers out at the jungle, spear in hand, searching the waters for a crocodile. Around him the night seethes ominously. When at last he kills his quarry, the screens abruptly fill with white-eyed death masks that seem, for once, as terrifying to the viewer as they must be to the native. Labyrinth’s narration is sometimes painfully portentous: “The hardest place to look is inside yourself, but that is where you will find the beast. . .” But for the most part it is a sonic boon, admirably understating Labyrinth’s stunning visual display.

Sound Engineering:

The Labyrinth required the creation of new equipment and new recording techniques for service both on location throughout the world and for re-recording in the building at Expo.

For location recording, a small, portable, stereo, pilot-tone recorder was developed, using two Nagra recorders arranged in tandem. For re-recording and mixing inside the Labyrinth a specially-designed mixing console was constructed and moved from chamber to chamber as the re-recording progressed. Only in this way could the effect of twenty different tracks feeding 858 speakers arranged in a variety of configurations be gauged. This record was prepared in the studios of the National Film Board, Montreal, using 3M 4-track, 1/2-inch tape players, Ampex 1/4-inch recorders, Altec speakers and the NFB console.

I highly recommend downloading the entire album, but if you would like to sample a taste first, check out my City Faces remix. It consists of a 14-second sample from Out of the Labyrinthe inserted at the beginning of City Faces. You can listen to the remix in the player below:

Track Listing:

1) Birth
2) City Faces
3) Tranquility
4) The Minotaur
5) The Wind in my Hand
6) Confident Youth
7) Into the Labyrinthe
8) Out of the Labyrinthe
9) The Universe spins on the point of my Head
10) Farewell to a Hero
11) Celebration
12) Thresherman’s Reunion

Biography:

Labyrinthe composer Eldon (Davis) Rathburn was born in Queenstown, New Brunswick, Canada on 21 April 1916. After early piano studies with Eric Rollinson in Saint John, NB, where he also played in Don Messer’s band, Eldon Rathburn won a CPRS scholarship for his compositions Silhouette (1936) and To a Wandering Cloud (1938). In 1938-9, he studied composition with Healey Willan, organ with Charles Peaker, and piano with Reginald Godden. For his Symphonette (1943) he received first prize in the Los Angeles Young Artists’ Competition (1944). He was a danceband pianist, church organist, and radio arranger 1939-47 in Saint John before joining the NFB, Ottawa, where he was a staff composer 1947-76. He taught film-music composition 1972-6 at the University of Ottawa. In common with other NFB composers, Rathburn developed a light-textured and economical style readily adaptable to the mood of a film.

By 1976, in addition to many concert works, Eldon Rathburn had composed 185 film scores (mostly shorts for the NFB) including To the Ladies (1947), Family Circle (1949), Children’s Concert (1951), The Romance of Transportation (1952), Who Will Teach Your Child? (1952), City of Gold (1957; the basis for a symphonic suite of the same name), Universe (1960), Drylanders (1963; his first feature-length score), Labyrinth (1967, a multi-screen extravaganza for which a special theatre was built at Expo 67; recorded on Dominion LAB-650S), Pillar of Wisdom (1968), The World of Paul Kane (1973), The Road to Green Gables (1975; for CBC TV), and Who Has Seen the Wind (1977; feature film). The NFB scores (1947-64) are listed in Musique et cinéma. In retirement in Ottawa, Rathburn remained active, composing and doing research on music with a railroad theme. His scores included music for the IMAX films Skyward (1984), Transitions (1986), The First Emperor of China (a China-Canada co-production 1989), and the NFB tribute to Norman McLaren, The Creative Process (1990). His scores are deposited at the National Library of Canada. Eldon Rathburn was a member of the CLComp and an associate of the Canadian Music Centre.

You definitely must drop by the Magic of Juju blog, where I scooped this interesting gem. Do NOT download this if you are musically timid, on medication (the prescribed kind, that is), or have a severe case of tinitis, or your ears may begin to leak copious amounts of fluid. Apparently Mr. Nothing dropped some blotters just before this recording was made for the Takoma label (C-1015) back in 1967. There, you have been warned. Enjoy!

Track Listing:

1) The Psychedelic Saxophone of Charlie Nothing (19:25)
2) In Eternity With Brother Fredrick (14:19)

This was the first of four albums released on Eno’s own, then new, Ambient label to actually carry the name “ambient” - a term which he had created to differentiate his minimalistic approach to the album’s material and “the products of the various purveyors of canned music”.

Notice of similarly quiet, unobtrusive music had been given on albums such as Evening Star, Discreet Music, Music for Films and Harold Budd’s The Pavilion of Dreams (which he produced), but in this album it was given precedence as a full-blown concept.

The music was designed to be continuously looped as a sound installation, with the intent to defuse the tense, anxious atmosphere of an airport terminal. It was installed at the Marine Air Terminal of New York’s LaGuardia Airport.

Track Listing:

The track labelling is the way it is because of the album’s first release (1978) as an LP, and so the first track means “first track, first side”, and so on.

“1/1″ : Acoustic & electric piano – 16:30
“2/1″ : Vocals only. – 8:20
“1/2″ : Vocals; acoustic piano. – 11:30
“2/2″ : Synthesizer only. – 9:30 (listed on most packaging as 6:00)

All tracks were composed by Eno except “1/1″, which was composed by Eno, former Soft Machine drummer Robert Wyatt, and Rhett Davies.

Music for Airports employs the phasing of tape loops of different length in some tracks, where, for example, in “1/1″, a single piano melody is repeated and at different times other instruments will fade in and out in a complex, evolving pattern due to the phenomenon of phasing: at some point these instrumental sounds will clump together, at some points, be spread apart.

Talking about the first piece, Eno has said:

“ … I found this very short section of tape where two pianos, unbeknownst to each other, played melodic lines that interlocked in an interesting way. To make a piece of music out of it, I cut that part out, made a stereo loop on the 24-track, then I discovered I liked it best at half speed, so the instruments sounded very soft, and the whole movement was very slow. ”

The two tracks containing the wordless “aaaaah”-style vocals intermingle four tracks which loop back on themselves and constantly interact with each other in new ways. Subtle changes in timing occur, adding to the timbre of the pieces.

Eno explains of the vocal-only piece:

“One of the notes repeats every 23 seconds. It is, in fact, a long loop running around a series of tubular aluminum chairs in Conny Plank’s studio. The next lowest loop repeats every 25 seconds or something like that. The third one every 29 seconds or something. What I mean is they all repeat in cycles that are called incommensurable — they are not likely to come back into sync again. Your experience of the piece, of course, is a moment in time, there. So as the piece progresses, what you hear are the various clusterings and configurations of these six basic elements. The basic elements in that particular piece never change. They stay the same. But the piece does appear to have quite a lot of variety.”

2/2, the synth piece, was performed with an ARP 2600.

Credits:

• Various instruments, cover art & production: Brian Eno
• Vocals : Christa Fast, Christine Gomez, Inge Zeininger
• Acoustic piano : Robert Wyatt
• Engineering : Dave Hutchins (2/1, 1/2), Conny Plank (2/2), Rhett Davies (1/1) and Eno
• Recording Location: Tracks 1-3 : London, Track 4 : Plank’s Studio, Cologne

Liner Notes:

The concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by Muzak Inc. in the fifties, and has since come to be known generically by the term Muzak. The connotations that this term carries are those particularly associated with the kind of material that Muzak Inc. produces - familiar tunes arranged and orchestrated in a lightweight and derivative manner. Understandably, this has led most discerning listeners (and most composers) to dismiss entirely the concept of environmental music as an idea worthy of attention.

Over the past three years, I have become interested in the use of music as ambience, and have come to believe that it is possible to produce material that can be used thus without being in any way compromised. To create a distinction between my own experiments in this area and the products of the various purveyors of canned music, I have begun using the term Ambient Music.

An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint. My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.

Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncracies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to `brighten’ the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and levelling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.

Ambient Music must be able to accomodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.

BRIAN ENO
September 1978

I was looking for more info on some classical Indian music I am about to post, when I discovered the Another Sucker on the Vine blog and a John Fahey offering. I’m a fan of Blind Joe Death, so I decided to re-post it here. Be sure to check out the great vine blog. Details below were copied from the original vine post:

Actually titled “Guitar Vol. 4″ the album is subtitled “The Great San Bernadino Birthday Party” and features the 19-minute song of the same name as the leadoff track.

This is probably the most experimental release of Fahey’s early years on Takoma, and gives a good indication where he would expand his sound in the years that followed. The title track is epic in every sense of the word, sounding like the soundtrack to an old west silent film that we’ve never seen. His guitar picking going between incredibly thought out raga’s and moving to very simplistic modern classical sounding pieces, the song retains the romantic feeling of the city and area of California from long ago.

From here, the rest of the record gets much more experimental.

“Knott’s Berry Farm Molly” employs the use of crazy tape loops that Fahey created with a standard mobile tape recorder. He tunes his guitar to an usual sound, starts picking and then suddenly starts using the backward loops, giving the track an entirely different feeling. The track goes back and forth between the two, and is a bit uneven, and not smooth in execution, but it pretty interesting regardless.

His take on “Will The Circle be Unbroken” one of the more famous traditional folk songs sounds unlike any version of the song at the time. The recording sounds like it was done in an open room with really cheap equipment. A field recording in a graveyard almost. The track is dominated by an organ played by Flea (not RHCP), and though it is far out itself, the organ line is the only way to tell this is the song the title states.

“Guitar Excursions into The Unknown” is wonderful. It’s harsh, terribly tuned guitar, but glorious picking. It really sets up what is known as that whole “free folk” movement out of Finland that has been really popular in the last years. Again sounds like a field recording or on terribly warped tapes, it truly is a track that sounds like it is recorded for the “unknown”

on “900 Miles” we get a beautiful track, but one in which the guitar is not at the forefront. Again Fahey puts himself in the background, framing the track around Nancy McLean’s flute playing.

Other than the tile track, “Sail Away Ladies” is probably the best track on the entire collection. Featuring Al Wilson of Canned Heat on veena, the middle eastern feel to the track changes the course of old America, but is really beautiful on it’s own merits.

“O Come, Oh Come Emanuel” is another traditional and goes back to the old Fahey style. Clean guitar picking, a perfect way to close out the record.

Fahey later went on to regard the record as one of the worst in his discography, but many critics of him, myself included, feel it belongs among his very best work. A retrospect on the genius that had been producing music for a decade and it also lays a blueprint for where he was about to go with his music.

Download Here:
Great San Bernadino Birthday Party

I was looking for some background info on some of John Fahey’s later releases when I discovered that he had started a re-issue label with Dean Blackwood in 1996 called Revenant Records. Fahey’s Takoma Records (1958-1979) is now legendary, but for some reason, I’d never caught wind of Revenant Records. The following was taken directly from RevenantRecords.com:

In Memoriam: John Fahey (1939-2001)

Distractions are the stuff of small dreams, and John Fahey was having none of it, ever. An essentialist if ever there was, Fahey pared his life back to the barest of bones, jettisoning the mundanities that plague the rest of us — paying bills, maintaining a home, exercise, ordinary hygiene — in favor of the work that was a spiritual necessity to him.

John was completely naked when I met him. And I don’t mean that in some sort of highfalutin’ metaphorical sense. He was flopped out on his bed, the way God made him, in one glorious sprawl. It was 1994, and I had flown into Salem, OR late at night, and he had left the door open for me. As I schlepped into his motel room, I may have been a bit startled at the sight, may have dropped my bag or something, because he stirred and then, spying me, extended his hand. I shook it, of course.

John came into some funds in 1995 or 1996, a small inheritance from his father’s estate. Instead of investing it wisely, he used it as seed money for a new label venture, which he intended for me to run. Ornette, Beefheart, Dock Boggs. These were a few of the archetypes around which the whole Revenant “raw musics” concept coalesced. Charley Patton, too, of course. This was to be the undiluted stuff that folks were likely to have in their personal archives somewhere but which was unlikely to have ever seen “legitimate” release. Shelved together, the releases were to appear more like a set of substantial books from the same publisher. Weighty tomes, JF said.

Charley was his passion, really, when it came down to it. He had written his masters thesis on Patton, a rather intriguing move at the time (mid ’60s), given that only a handful of people had ever heard of CP then. Things hadn’t changed that much by the time the thesis was published as a book in 1970. A fairly tiny smattering of acolytes thanked their lucky stars and the book promptly went out of print, a status it maintained for more than 30 years.

When I first met John, I wondered if he’d had a stroke or something. He spoke with an odd, foggy lilt in his voice that gave the suggestion of brain damage to his motor centers. He never consciously attempted to dispel this impression. He would, however, do things like show up in Austin, where I live, clutching a sheaf of handwritten pages ripped from a spiral notebook, pages on which he had furiously scribbled lengthy, fully footnoted essays off the top of his head on the plane ride over, which notes would ultimately be transcribed, without any further edits being necessary (except as regards spelling; he was a notoriously creative speller), into the notes for the Revenant release of the day. He would shove the slightly grubby papers at me, saying, “I wouldn’t mind something to eat” or “I remember a thrift store in the south part of town” and off we would go, the notes completely a thing of the past for him. The footnoting, which might reference obscure philosophy texts, religious treatises, biblical passages, releases on the Bluebird label circa 1929—33, and the minor works of Klimt, would invariably turn out to be accurate in every respect.

Fahey’s not just dead, he’s extinct. His kind. A genuine eccentric in an age of affectation, we won’t see his likes again. And we are — I am — much the poorer for it. It is both a comfort and a stiff challenge to realize that his fingerprints are and will remain all over this raw musics enterprise of ours. I’ve got some work ahead of me.

MP3 Downloads from the Revenant Records Collection:

		American Primitive Vol. II: Pre-War Revenants (1897-1939), 2005 Deal_Rag.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 2) Big_Bed_Bug_Bed_Bug_Blues.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 4) I_Got_Your_Ice_Cold_NuGrape.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 5)
		Albert Ayler, Holy Ghost: Rare and Unissued Recordings (1962-70), 2004
		John Fahey, Red Cross Disciple of Christ Today, 2003
		Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton, 2001 A_Spoonful_Blues.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 2) Cold_Woman_Blues.mp3 (Disc 6, Track 11)
		The No-Neck Blues Band, Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones But Names Will Never Hurt Me, 2001 Back_To_The_Omind_Id_Rather_Not_Go.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 4)
		Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume Four, 2000 Parchman_Farm_Blues.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 13) Mean_Old_World.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 14)
		Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, Grow Fins: Rarities [1965-1982], 1999 Electricity.mp3 (Disc 2, Track 1) Click_Clack.mp3 (Disc 5, Track 14)
		Dock Boggs, Country Blues, 1998 Sugar_Baby.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 1) Country_Blues.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 3)
		Charlie Feathers, Get With It: Essential Recordings (1954-69), 1998 Get_With_It.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 6) One_Hand_Loose.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 8) Johnny_Come_Listen.mp3 (Disc 2, Track 8)
		Sir Richard Bishop, Salvador Kali, 1998 Burning_Caravan.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 1) Hadley.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 6)
		American Primitive Vol. 1: Raw Pre-War Gospel (1926-36), 1997 Honey_in_the_Rock.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 3) Lord_Im_the_True_Vine.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 10)
		Bassholes, Blue Roots, 1997 Judge_Harsh_Blues.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 1) Light_Bulb_Boogie.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 5)
		Jenks “Tex” Carman, Chippeha!: The Essential Dixie Cowboy (1947-1957), 1997 The_Artillery_Song.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 1) Fire_Ball_Mail.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 7)
		Stanley Brothers, Earliest Recordings: The Complete Rich-R-Tone 78s (1947-1952), 1997 Molly_and_Tenbrook.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 1) The_Little_Glass_of_Wine.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 6)
		Jim O’Rourke, Happy Days, 1997 Happy_Days.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 1)
		Derek Bailey, Music And Dance, 1997 Rain_Dance.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 1)
		Cecil Taylor, Nefertiti, The Beautiful One Has Come: Live at the Cafe Montmartre, 1962, 1997 Call.mp3 (Disc 1, Track 2)

All hail the Great Kooniklaster! Ok? Apparently I have a LOT more exploration to do in the land of Blind Joe Death (aka John Fahey [1939-2001]). His work has been referred to as avant-folk by some, blues by others, but this 1997 album with Cul de Sac defies classification, except to say that it is experimental. A great album for a rainy day when you feel like doing absolutely nothing, save for watching the raindrops run down the window-pane. Segments of this release are dark and creepy enough for a Halloween party. The following liner notes are courtesy of Thirsty Ear Records:

The Making of The Epiphany of Glenn Jones

I was introduced to the music of John Fahey in the early ’70s by my high school art teacher, who played me “The River Medley” from the first of his two Reprise albums, Of Rivers and Religions. The first album I bought myself was Fahey’s fourth for his Takoma label, The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party. It was, for me, one of those life-changing albums, important as only the right album at the right time is to a curious kid with a growing interest in esoteric music.

In high school, I’d discovered the requisite mind blowers: Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica,Stockhausen’s Hymnen, the Stooges’ Fun House. Later, I began corresponding with Harry Partch and Sun Ra and purchased records from them via mail. I began playing guitar after hearing Hendrix’s Axis: Bold As Love. But the discovery of Fahey’s music struck me more closely than did the others; among acoustic guitarists he quickly became my favorite. I bought every album by him I could find, and was soon enveloped in the esoteric world he invented in his liner notes. All very mysterious, obscure — and very sexy.

At the time, I lived close enough to New York City to make it in whenever he appeared. Soon I was monkeying around with open tunings myself.

A few years later I moved to the Boston area, where Fahey has always had a large following and where he was playing fairly regularly at the time. I began corresponding with other devotees of “the Takoma school” (mainly in Europe) and was soon trading tapes of Fahey the way other kids traded tapes of Led Zeppelin. Bootleg guitar tablature soon followed.

I finally met John in the late ’70s at one of his shows at Jonathan Swift’s, in Cambridge’s Harvard Square. Fahey was asking the audience to name the composer of a piece he’d just played. Amidst shouts of “Chet Atkins” (”What??! Hell, no!!”) and “Barbecue Bob” (”Barbecue Bob? I like Barbecue Bob, but that’s not even close.”) I identified the piece as one by Brazilian guitarist Bola Sete. (Sete’s Ocean - which Fahey had produced and issued on Takoma - may be the most perfect solo acoustic guitar album ever recorded.) Fahey asked me to come see him after the show; I’d won a date with my hero. We hung out and I discovered we shared other interests as well - Blind Willie Johnson and Skip James, the Stanley Brothers, the Third Symphony of Roy Harris. (At the same time I thought I was too smart, too self-aware, to let myself be caught up in anything as sordid as sycophantic groupie-ism. After all, I was very familiar with Fahey’s Guitar Player article about his obsession with - who else? - Bola Sete. One of the essential Fahey tracts, it is John’s account of his own battles with demon idolatry.)

In the early ’90s our first drummer, Chris Guttmacher, and I formed Cul de Sac, a vehicle for my own experiments with open tunings and an attempt to wed fingerstyle guitar with other influences - middle eastern, electronic and trance music, etc. - set in a rock context. We covered Fahey’s “Portland Cement Factory at Monolith California” on our debut album, ECIM. Subsequently, Fahey’s influence on me (and thus Cul de Sac) would frequently be cited in articles and reviews of our records and shows.

In 1995, writer Byron Coley visited Fahey in Portland, Oregon for a feature he’d pitched to Spin. Career-wise and health-wise Fahey was not doing well. Though some of his Takoma albums had been reissued, the bulk were out-of-print and few had been reissued on CD. A divorce (his third) had left him with little. The fact that he wasn’t gigging had dulled his playing. He was living in a “welfare motel” where drug deals and robberies were not uncommon. He supplemented his income by canvassing for records at thrift stores, which he resold to dealers (he’s especially knowledgeable in the area of collectible classical LPs). When the money got too scarce he even pawned his guitars.

Coley’s article, along with several pages devoted to him in Spin’s Record Guide to Alternative Music, had the effect of kick-starting Fahey’s flagging career. A potential audience unfamiliar with his work grew curious. Prompted by Coley, Geffen Record’s Ray Farrell got approval to record demos for a proposed album which would feature John backed by some musicians he supposedly influenced: Thurston Lee from Sonic Youth, Beck, Cul de Sac and others.

No matter that Fahey was still suffering from Epstein-Barr, had been diagnosed with diabetes and was not playing especially well; the idea seized me. We’d pull it off somehow.

The proposed album had been budgeted only through the demo stages. If the demos passed muster with the honchos at Geffen, then the album would be given the nod for real. But Geffen didn’t want to fly Fahey to the East Coast to record, preferring to wait until he was touring there to send him into the studio. But no gigs were forthcoming. Finally, Manny Greenhill, Fahey’s longtime manager, died. The project, as it had been originally conceived, withered on the vine.

Following the release of our China Gate album in mid-’96, Robin Amos was discussing “projects that might have been” with Thirsty Ear’s Peter Gordon, and Fahey’s name came up. A fan, Gordon was enthusiastic about the idea of a collaboration between Fahey and Cul de Sac and began negotiations with Fahey’s new manager, Dean Blackwood.

At the same time, Fahey’s decade long battle with Epstein-Barr had about run its course. John’s creative energy and strength were returning. He’d begun experimenting with electric instruments and effects boxes, and was recording new sound collages (they’d always been a part of his earlier work, despite their unorthodoxy by “folk music” standards, even in the ’60s); but now Fahey was incorporating harsher, more industrial noises into his sonic compositions.

Fahey’s guitar playing was also changing. Stripped to its barest essentials, his playing was simpler, freer. He’d abandoned some of the aggressive double thumbing of his early records, but without sacrificing any of the actual aggression itself. Fahey recorded City of Refuge, his first new album of original material in several years.

And suddenly he was very much in the limelight. Gastr del Sol covered John’s “Dry Bones in the Valley” for their album, Upgrade and Afterlife, which led to the band and Fahey touring together on the West Coast. Vestapol issued a video of Fahey recorded live in early ‘96 at the Freight & Salvage in Los Angeles. Fantasy, which had purchased the rights to the Takoma catalogue, began to reissue John’s albums on CD, complete with their original notes and previously unissued and “lost” tracks. Britain’s The Wire ran a lengthy interview with Fahey and Jim O’Rourke. The Table of the Elements label hired John to play its Yttrium Festival in Chicago in November of ‘96, where Fahey appeared alongside guitarists Loren MazzaCane Connors, O’Rourke and violinist Tony Conrad. Fahey recorded an album with O’Rouke producing. Articles and interviews began appearing everywhere. Perhaps most exciting was the birth of Fahey’s first label since he’d lost Takoma decades ago: Revenant (headed by Fahey and Dean Blackwood).

I didn’t like Fahey’s new album as much as the records I’d grown up listening to. But I thought Cul de Sac could make an album with the hero of my imagination and of an imagined 1966 anyway; in short, with a John Fahey who didn’t exist (and probably never existed, except in the temple I’d built for him in my mind.)

Following Fahey’s Chicago appearance he flew to Cambridge to prepare for this album. Though I’d known him for years I had no idea what it would be like to work with John. Except for our drummer, Jon Proudman, the rest of Cul de Sac - Robin and Chris - were only slightly familiar with Fahey’s work.

The affair got off to a rocky start. Fahey missed his connecting flight and landed in Boston several hours after his luggage. When he did appear he discovered he’d left all his medication in his Chicago hotel room and had to go to the emergency room of a Cambridge hospital to get his prescription filled. Fort Apache cancelled our reservation for the studio and booked someone else, which sent us scrambling for another place to record. Fahey received his contract and was in a stew over its terms which he bitterly complained about until Dean explained that everything was in order. Fahey would enthuse over the material I was presenting one day; the next day he hated it.

It’s wrong to create heroes; it’s not possible for them to fit the perverse folds of one’s imagination.

For a week of rehearsal I struggled to teach Fahey some of our material, and learn some of his that I could teach to the band. This was a mistake. In trying to be Fahey’s conduit to the band (and vice versa), I managed to piss off both the band and Fahey.

After a Boston photo shoot, we made our way to Warren, Rhode Island’s Normandy Studios, the new site for the project. We had nine days to record and mix an album. But, after two days of recording basics, John, growing more and more impatient, rebelled. I discovered that he had no interest in making the kind of record I’d envisioned. He attacked the material, said it would be disastrous for his career to be associated with it, called us a “retro lounge act.”

And while Cul de Sac might run through a song three or four times, Fahey rarely played a song more than once. He has little patience in striving for the perfect take. Accidents and serendipity delight him. (I can still see him stretched out on the floor of the studio control room listening to the playback of this album’s final track, roaring with laughter.) For him, recording is an opportunity to be in touch with his inner self and his emotions.

So the album - as I’d tried to mold it - blew up in my face. Fahey refused to play most of what we’d rehearsed. The rest of the band, feeling good about the basics we’d laid down, was back in Boston at this point and had no idea what was going on.

I felt at sea - depressed and confused. I had grave doubts whether the project could continue; whether I could continue.

Making matters worse were our accommodations. The studio apartment where Cul de Sac and our producer were to live for the nine days of the sessions ran out of fuel just as the November weather turned suddenly bitterly cold and it began to snow. It being Thanksgiving week, we were told we couldn’t expect any relief for at least a couple of days. Without heat (or hot water) we brought the studio space heaters up to the apartment to try to provide some warmth - and promptly blew out all the fuses in the place. Now we were without light as well. My bunk bed collapsed. I felt as though I was taking part in some hellish sensory-deprivation experiment.

Several days into the project I awoke, feeling grubby and dazed. My breath was visible on the frozen air. As the sun rose over the skeletal remains of a dead pigeon on the windowsill, I stared blearily into the bleak Warren streets and thought myself - and this project - accursed.

Meanwhile, Fahey (who was staying in a motel during the sessions) was arriving fresh at the studio each morning, nonplussed by what I viewed as a catastrophe. (”Sorry,” said my hero.)

Then Peter at Thirsty Ear began calling. Having invested deeply in the project, he was now in a panic and demanded to know what was happening. What could I say? We didn’t know.

Exhausted, I wondered what to do. I could quit the project (an attractive idea, given how I was feeling emotionally and physically), or I could just let go and see what happened. Our producer, Jon Williams, urged me to surrender. When I did I felt the greatest relief of my life. I stopped worrying. I tried to keep an open mind about what was happening, and I let it happen. I refused to take calls from anyone. From that point on my sole responsibility was to Cul de Sac, Fahey and our producer.

In scrapping what we’d started, the process of making a record together became part of the record itself. The sessions became more challenging. The mood of the music was often dark, mysterious - at times almost morbid. But, as we and Fahey got into it, the sessions became more spontaneous - more fun. (For “Gamelan Guitar” I recorded eight tracks of dried rice, lentils, pinto and fava beans being poured into different size bowls and onto the strings of four different guitars, each in its own variant open G tuning.)

The Epiphany of Glenn Jones isn’t the album I envisioned. Likely it is a more interesting album than any of us (save Fahey perhaps) had imagined: braver, more honest, more personal and more a reflection of who and where we were at the time we made it. By Fahey’s criteria, that counts for a lot. And while I haven’t revised my opinion of City of Refuge, I now understand why John is so proud of that album - it is a snapshot of himself at the time he made it.

More importantly, the scales fell from my eyes about John Fahey. “Good!” said Fahey when I told him, “now maybe we can be better friends.”

What put this album back on track?

Something very unusual occurred. Fahey had recorded a spoken word piece (”Beginning,” not included here) which gave us an inkling as to how we might proceed. A faint flicker of hope - a sign - then Fahey hit the the thrift stores to shop for used records. He returned excited. He hadn’t bought any records. Instead he brought back with him one of the most extraordinary objects I’ve ever seen. I can’t possibly describe it in a way that will do it justice. It was a monstrosity. Shaped like an art deco “S,” with a hole in the middle and the top, it appeared to be made of some sort of glazed ceramic. Painted in pink, maroon, light blue and yellow stripes, each color was separated by a thin shaky gold line. (Obviously it was hand painted, but by what perverted, unsteady hand?) Fahey was beside himself. “Everything’s going to be alright! I found it! It’s…the Great Kooniklaster!” Fahey reverently placed the Great Kooniklaster in front of the control room window and sent the assistant engineer on a hunt for lighting appropriate for its shrine. Once situated in its spotlit glory, Fahey insisted that we look at it as we recorded the album, that we worship it. In retrospect, I can’t help but wonder if Fahey meant to show that only by ceasing to worship false idols (John Fahey) could the project be allowed to proceed. And so he brought in a substitute - a true idol. Was this the meaning of the Great Kooniklaster? There is little more to say. The album stands. It was, for me, an ordeal to make. It still smarts to listen to it. But it feels like the right album at the right time. I’m very proud of it.

–Glenn Jones, Cambridge, MA, June 1997

Post Script: Shortly after these sessions the Great Kooniklaster fell off the top of the refrigerator and shattered. It has served its purpose.

John Fahey and Cul de Sac
The Epiphany of Glenn Jones
23 September 1997
CD Thirsty Ear 57037
320 kbps MP3

1) Tuff - 5:05
2) Gamelan Collage - 10:11
3) The New Red Pony - 5:52
4) Maggie Campbell Blues - 3:17
5) Our Puppet Selves - 8:20
6) Gamelan Guitar - 5:28
7) Come On In My Kitchen - 4:06
8) Magic Mountain - 9:00
9) More Nothing - 6:37
10) Nothing - 15:49