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" |