Thread: John Fahey
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Old 01.25.2011, 12:21 AM   #96
atsonicpark
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btw, derek, fare forward voyagers I think is my girlfriend's favorite. You really understand girls I think.

btw, who likes fahey collaborator GLENN JONES? A lot of people have said Rose was the new Fahey (RIP), but -- no disrespect intended here -- I felt like he usually didn't add much to what Fahey had already done. BLACKSHAW, while quite awesome in his own right, is doing something pretty different, and while it's awesome, it doesn't have a Fahey feel at all. Other contemporary guitarists, like Harris Newman and Steffen Basho, are awesome, but none really seem to have that ... feel ... like GLENN JONES. I'm sure anyone interested in Fahey already has this, and I myself have been jamming it for well over a year now, so I think it's okay to post this:

http://www.mediafire.com/?zagzatwxiym

BBQ BOB IN FISHTOWN... it's influenced by Fahey, but isn't derivative of. PLEASE, only listen to this album if you want your mind blown! Truely an excellent album. It's only about 50mb, and only about a half an hour long, so please give it a whirl. You won't be sorry, I can gurantee that.

Unlike all the other guitarists, it could almost be mistaken for a Fahey disc -- unlike Rose, who seemed to downright emulate Fahey's best moments (and even reused some of his riffs), Glenn saw that Fahey himself didn't repeat; Fahey was always looking ahead, which is why many of Fahey's fans stopped listening to him when he completely changed his sound (which is sad; HITOMI, RED CROSS, and all the other stuff from that period, was just awesome -- albeit in a completely different way). Fahey was all about looking ahead. So, while this has some of the American primitive trademarks, the main thing here is that Glenn is doing some truely different stuff, which Fahey would be proud of. Of all the new solo guitarists, I think Jones is the most inventive and interesting and the one to watch. Also, of course, he's probably amongst the least popular. I guess that always happens when you're doing something new.

As for Rose, his last album LUCK IN THE VALLEY was great, definitely his best, and saw him start to mostly move away from Fahey. What a tragic loss to see him pass at such a young age, when he was truely starting to find himself, I think.

FARE FORWARD:
when the fire and the rose are blah blah... best song.. you know the coolest part? About 12 minutes in, so kinda near the end, when he plays this simple, beautiful high pitched arpeggio... it's very beautiful and melodic and one of the most straightforward and simple things he's done, yet it perfectly exemplifies, and encapsulates, what makes Fahey so special, not to mention that it comes after one of his most complex compositions (I say "compositions" because he performed that song live countless times; I've actually never thought about this, but Fahey wasn't a man who improvised much, oh don't get me wrong -- he HAD improvisations inside of his songs, but he never just went at it for 20 minutes at a time, it was more "well, why not fuck with this part" or "I'm sick of the way this part is going, so I'll play it faster this time"... ANYWAY, this just blows my mind, because Fahey's songs are almost like classical pieces sometimes, with various movements all exploring the same kinda themes, he's clearly inspired by classical music in some of his compositions, and I think while his "technique" is a bit simpler than most finger pickers, I think he probably had better taste (he loved punk music, he loved Merzbow and noise music, he loved ambient and drone, he loved noise rock bands, his favorite musician was Jim O'Rourke -- this wasn't just a hard-drinkin' man who loved the blues, he was a cocaine-snorting teddy bear who could be seen blasting Pulse Demon and Harry Partch while eating popcorn out of his bedroom...).

You know how Thurston said Fahey was a big influence on SY (hence the Eternal ass cover)? I have thought about this a lot. I think it's not so much in the early SY -- or the early Fahey, for that matter, it's more like in albums like FARE FORWARD and in albms like WASHING MACHINE... unconventional riffing, and unconventional structures, unconventional tunings, that all sound somewhat conventional.. Fahey created his own language -- albeit from using bits and pieces of pre-existing language -- as did SY...... But SY regularly eschewed "choruses" in the traditional sense, but almost all of their songs have a pretty strange flow to them, even the more straightforward ones. It's definitely not a verse chorus verse chorus solo chorus chorus band, yet at the same time, the songs do feel structured, and I think part of is that they never really get too out of control -- Steve's propulsive drumming always reels them back in so they never get completey lost. They really love a good riff and will play it just long enough, never too long. And they're always inserting strange new riffs into the mix. Thurston usually holds down the rhythmic fort while Lee is constantly inserting strange and fresh new riffs, while never losing sight of the song, its structure, its driving force, etc. I think Fahey did this a lot too -- he was capable of working with very unconventional means, in a very unusual language, to get his point across, but even when kind of going off on strange new tangents in his songs, he always made sure and kept the song in mind; if that makes sense -- he always knew what he was doing, what he was trying to say, and where things were going. Despite even Fahey getting a little chaotic, the chaos is very controlled. You just have to listen to a song a few times to really get that.
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