Hitomi
a
new CD release by John Fahey on LivHouse Records
available
now at http://www.livhouse.com
| If much of the latest album from Fahey sounds, at first, like attempts to tune a guitar or teeth-grating reruns of the same riff we should not be surprised. Over the past 40 years Fahey has cut a determinedly idiosyncratic musical figure, by turns finding and alienating audiences with a raw brew - of guitar blues, folk and recorded street sounds - that refuses to be neatly pigeonholed. But then, the avant-garde, by definition, is not easy music. Keep listening, and these dislocated fragments draw together in a kind of skewed, lo-fi version of Japanese minimalism, where plucked notes hang against a distant tinkling ripple, (as on Delta Flight 53) or juddering train sounds are complemented by a guitar squall that reels up and down the scale (as on The Dance of the Cat People). The man Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth called a "secret influence" now has a home among post-rockers such as Jim O'Rourke, but his music is still fantastically way out there. (KD) from "The Scotsman" |
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