the past comes back to haunt you: the fonotone years 1958-1965

the day before yesterday we were into the takoma records years - john fahey launches one of the first independent labels and turns the solo steel-strung acoustic guitar into a concert instrument all the time while writing hippie and folkie baiting sleeve notes. like harry smith, like al ‘blind owl’ wilson (and the other ‘blues purists’), he doesn’t like the woody guthrie/ pete seeger ‘folk music as politics by other means’ strategy. 

horsemouth is remiss in not writing about this yesterday but he was out with john clarkson first at a daytime stick in the wheel gig in islington and then down at the buddhist medicine exhibition down at the welcome museum (both good). they then distracted from enlightenment by a pint of craft beer (hiss boo) in one of the old gatehouses to euston station before heading off their separate ways. in the evening horsemouth watched godard’s weekend and mike figgis’s comments on it.

before he started takoma records fahey had recorded for blues collector joe bussard - (both as himself and as blind thomas) these recordings from 1958 eventually emerged in 2011 as the past comes back to haunt you: the fonotone years 1958-1965.

fahey will go to university then on to berkeley, then on to UCLA to study folklore and to write his thesis on charlie patton.

before he will be a record collector making collecting trips with richard k. spottswood - in baltimore they will find the copy of blind willie johnson’s praise lord i’m satisfied that will start fahey’s interest in the blues.

fahey week is over for another year but today is also the anniversary of the death of another guitarist fahey distributed via takoma records, robbie basho. other guitarists put out by takoma include leo kottke, bola sete and peter lang, as well as emerging pianist george winston. both basho and winston will end up putting out albums on ECM.

february -gigs, books, films, events

gigs

27/02 alabaster de plume and stick in the wheel 
6/02 ES

books

a history of reading, mimesis, music and the irish literary imagination, the fable of the bees, portugal: 50 years of dictatorship, weirdstone of brisingamen 

films 

the trail of the spider, inferno, the knick, weekend, the wrestler, the thick of it (series 1), whiplash

events

diner round myk's, denise's birthday, groundhog day, richard visits, sean visits, fahey week.

fare forward voyagers (of rivers and religion)

day five of fahey week and we are back to 1973’s fare forward voyagers - inspired (allegedly by fahey’s chasing after swami phahupada’s secretary (shanthi norris) - this is fahey’s blues reconfigured as phrases in an indian raga. this one horsemouth really likes - of rivers and religion features fahey playing in ensembles with old new orleans jazz musicians - it’s great, as is after the ball (though admittedly the cover for that one is terrible).



fahey is splitting his work between takoma and vanguard - it’s all good - but he’s about to fall into a trough of despond for a few years.

'cosmic sentimentality'

as we travel backwards in time through john fahey’s life’s work here we are with 1980’s yes jesus loves me. horsemouth is too knackered to talk about fahey’s christmas albums (the best selling albums of his career - of which this, perhaps not the last, was his worst selling record ever). and yet it’s surprisingly decent (let all mortal flesh keep silence as an organ voluntary redone for the acoustic guitar horsemouth singles out for especial praise as it were).


horsemouth is watching the wrestler mickey rourke’s comeback movie that so nearly does it - his punchdrunk ageing wrestler persists in folly and the film (sentimentally) rewards him for it. fahey is very nearly back to the peak years of his career - tomorrow horsemouth will talk about fare forward voyagers and saturday he will talk about the dance of death and the other key early albums, on sunday horsemouth will talk about john fahey’s early fonotone recordings for joe bussard and then we will end with his influences and the music that predates his epiphany with blind willie johnson’s praise god I’m satisfied.

 

the return of the repressed and

horsemouth may be repeating a canard here but allegedly fahey’s 1989 shanachie released album god, time and causality was (with the exception of one track recorded with terry robb in salem, oregon) originally recorded back in 1977 for takoma (his own record label) and rejected by them.

 it features a number of medleys of his established material and (by 1989) yet another version of red pony (a tune he had recorded numerous times under numerous different names since at least 1969).

fahey had been running an independent record label (one of the first) pressing them up in limited edition runs because he was (at the start of his career) unknown and short of funds. he would frequently lose the master tapes and be obliged to re-record the entire album (later, or maybe round about now, he would ask one of his disciples to do it and the odd track would sneak on to a CD reissue - another source of money - ). the independent had been a success and fahey had landed several albums onto other record labels as a result of it - but we are getting ahead of ourselves in our backwards storytelling of his ‘career’.

by 1989 fahey has moved to salem oregon - he has plenty of health problems - he needs the money -it will not be until 1994 that his ‘career’ will be relaunched by new wave aficionados with the compilation return of the repressed - so he’s busy selling his stuff all over town to keep those royalty cheques coming in. this record sounds great (if a little familiar) but (sorry designers) it looks terrible.

 "When I play the guitar, even when I am practising, I am besieged with images, memories, deja vu experiences, and emotions; and for every chord I play, for every tune I write, there is within me a distinct and unique image, emotion, or feeling. What made and continues to make guitar playing exciting for me, and what makes it bearable during long, long two-set jobs, is the continual show of emotions, images, memories, etc., that comes before me internally as I continue to practice or play... Where was I when I wrote this song? What is the name of this strange feeling I am having while I play this chord sequence or this song? Consciousness is in a constant state of flux." - John Fahey 

 there is a game with time that horsemouth is playing here, like philip k.dick’s counterclock world (or martin amis’s times arrow), where what was the resolution of the material becomes its opening statement, grows to fullness then disperses into its inspirations. there is an inversion both of the moral sense of things and their meaning in terms of causality. there is an opportunity here to see things differently.

city of refuge

fahey week day two 


jumping back 6-7 years, and allowing ourselves seven such jumps to cover the years of his recording career and the years of his formation, we are with the album city of refuge. these were the cities that murderers were allowed to flee too and not be pursued in biblical times. fahey himself  is hiding out in salem oregon.


the source for this title is probably blind willie johnson’s (I’m gonna run to the) city of refuge - this record is john fahey’s elongated fuck you to the windham hill new age scene he helped spawn - On the death and disembowelment of the new age as one song title has it, hope slumbers eternal another.

this stuff doesn’t really do it for horsemouth but it’s solid enough improv - the rebellious energies that used to go into the sleevenotes have migrated into the music.

excuse me sir. do you have a minute to talk about john fahey? (red cross disciple of christ today)

today begins fahey week with the 15th anniversary of his death. it will end sunday the 28th with the anniversary of his birth (and co-incidentally the anniversary of the death of robbie basho).

fahey is the main inspiration for what horsemouth does when he does musical things. his effect on horsemouth when he isn’t doing or making things is more difficult to quantify - perhaps fahey’s silences, his years of not releasing music, count also.

this time horsemouth will begin at the end.

horsemouth begins by listening to red cross disciple of christ today as he types this. it is from fahey’s last ‘electric’ years - his late style. its title taken from the text of a sermon by the reverend moses mason recorded in alabama between 1927 and 1934, its subject the mississippi floods of 1927.



the reverend moses sermon is immediate the biblical lands and people overlay and appear again in the south and in the context of the flood (very phillip k. dick) - he wants to take us to the moment of panic, to the rising water, to the calling out to god for salvation. fahey keeps some of the intonation of this, some of the bends and swoops but it is more meditative, we are back at a distance from events.

the usual reading of fahey’s late style is that he could no longer play the complicated fingerpicked acoustic stuff anymore - that it is a music of debility. horsemouth contemplates the arthritis most apparent in the little finger of his right hand but apparent also in his left - it is ok to change one’s style as one gets older, to be smart as to how one communicates musically when one gets older. music is not entirely about speed and precision and skill and musical technique - it can be about using what you have learned to still make something satisfying even after the old avenues are closed off to you.

more tomorrow...

'when the ship goes down you'd better be ready' (golden glow)

sean has just been to visit (and is now back off to comic con). horsemouth has retreated home to cough and sniffle. we have made it to our fifties (something we couldn’t reasonably have expected to forsee), our pensions (viewed as a paradise of once again being  economically inactive ) however still seem impossibly far away.

we now have a date for the vote on brexit - horsemouth is toying with the notion that the economic and political carnage caused by brexit (in as much as it is actually possible) would be a fair price to pay for the end of austerity driven economic ‘growth’.

the great british ruling class are relying upon inertia to keep the british in europe - backstory: to keep his eurosceptics quiet, tactical genius cameron promised them a referendum on europe - now the great british public (caution may include 4 million ukip voters) get to vote on a major economic and political matter - thinking about it now prime minister, was that really wise? 

horsemouth is tempted to vote for brexit just on the basis that it will be funny (though it would mean keeping company with farage, gove and a whole bunch of goons). wales, scotland, the north, northern ireland, cornwall probably, the landed gentry, the farmers, all rely on european money. and without that then what?

brexit would probably lead to scexit - unless the scots nats MPs have got too comfortable in westminster. the existing tensions of the rest of the country (and even the republic of ireland) being dragged about in the van of london and the south east would intensify to point of fracture.

internationalists that we all are - especially those of us that are ‘economic migrants’ (and not just those from wales, scotland, ireland and ’the north’) aren’t we just choosing the bosses’ europe over the bosses’ britain, aren’t we just choosing what is good for capitalism in the hope that some of the good stuff will trickle down. maybe portugal should be our guide. as soon as the ship starts to go down is a good time to jump ship - when the ship goes down you’d better be ready...

press button to operate donkeys (procopius)

so horsemouth has finished reading antonio de figueiredo’s portugal: fifty years of dictatorship most of which was spent under the strange half cleric/ half accountant salazar.

 ‘i am one more writer who will die in intellectual solitary confinement. they never allowed me to write down what i wanted to say.’ remarks the novelist alves redol from his deathbed.

but the whole country (and its overseas empire/ colonies/ provinces) is one giant zombie exporting its surplus population not just to the colonies mozambique, angola, guinnea-bessau, goa but also to the car plants of france.

he’s also started (back) on auerbach’s mimesis - the paratactic approach of the bible (I show you two things without stating their connection - each become a figure, a heralding, a visual echo of the other) bumps up against the syntactic approach in greek and roman thought (I show you two things but their relation is carefully set out in the connecting words as if viewed from above). the church fathers, classically educated, writing in latin, feel this.

meanwhile the descendents of the romans driven mad by events produce texts of baroque horror. ammianus writes of procopius ‘the somber melancholic conspirator... always looking down, who, scion of an illustrious family hides among the scum of the people’ in the end agrees to become emperor just to save his neck (and that if only for a little while);

‘so there he stood like a rotting corpse, like a man risen from the grave, without a mantle (because imperial purple could nowhere be found), is tunic embroidered with gold like an attendant at court, but from the waist down dressed like a schoolboy... in his left hand he bore a lance , in his right hand a piece of purple cloth...’ - ammianus (26.6).

earnest and young (and a gig in herefordshire)

sorry people - gig cancelled 

thursday night horsemouth went out with his friend richard (who is visiting the seaside towns). as you may remember the wild hare club (and hence richard) was the first person to put horsemouth up onstage as a single act. horsemouth is grateful and glad to advertise it here.

it’s been a pig of a year allround but frankly horsemouth’s problems are small beer compared to those other of his friends are in receipt of. they met on the southbank (horsemouth killing time before the meet in the rfh with the fuel poor but transport rich OAPs, homeless, gypsies and yummy mummies/ au pairs).

they walked down the river - horsemouth tried to tempt richard with the black friar (but it was too busy), the george in southwark was initially elusive but they found it eventually - eventually got served and went outside into the unusually warm(ish) evening.

soon (attracted by richard’s persistent namedropping) horsemouth and richard were introduced to an earnest and young suit couple at their table. with the guy horsemouth and richard had a friendly conversation about music (fucken’ hell what is it about the youth and pink floyd?) - he seemed to like the kind of music that horsemouth liked when he was his age (or possibly even a little younger). he was with a certain firm of management consultants and they were working him to death (blah). they’d known each other from before and both come to the city to escape the countryside. horsemouth announced that he as probably going the other way (such was the city), richard stated that he’d already gone that way (back to the countryside to grow potatoes).

she was a bit more interested and interesting - hooked in by the term machiavellian ‘what do you mean by machiavellian?’ she asked as she lent in (displaying a superb grasp of it in practice). she’d travelled. she’d spent time in township in south africa (interestingly enough the night before horsemouth had dreamt he’d met his dad in a shebeen - his dad was having a whale of a time). she worked in HR. she was an optimist. at the end horsemouth wished her luck.

the employers of the minute no longer say that the employees are a great cost rather there is a school of thought that talks of them as a cohort of innovators - but neither should be taken at face value both are the ideology of their age and location. when vast numbers of workers produced stuff they were a cost as part of an agreed process of value creation. now that process of value creation is far less clear in its detail. similarly the reliance on our human capacities is not a victory for our humanity over the soullessness of work but part of a process of renegotiation of the relationship between capital and worker.

ok horsemouth is off to go babysitting. later. this weekend he will mostly be being good and trying not to fall over.

the nature of horsemouth was irrepressible (whiplash)

well as someone suggested (or as horsemouth read in some puff piece in a free newspaper recently) it is the year of the monkey on its way in. but it has (sneakily and typically) arrived a little early and already begun upsetting everything and tearing down any old established patterns. jobs, housing, friendships, all that was solid melts into air. 

horsemouth’s face continues to heal (after he took a drunken tumble saturday night - well sunday morning really). horsemouth is sensitive about his looks (or such of them that still remain). you would think he would know better by now than to drink like a fool (but no). horsemouth doesn’t feel much in the way of shame yet - though doubtless after he has been made to explained his predicament a few times he will.

before he fell over (and before the karaoke) there was a gig at the moth club in hackney. horsemouth liked the first band on ES (they’re also in Primetime, Gloss Rejection, The Worms and Black Fungus) . they reminded him of the fatal microbes, crass, er...hormone rage that sort of thing. curiously there was a band working that crass/ pop group thing at the last metal night horsemouth and andrew minty went to at the angel (what were they called again).

last night horsemouth watched whiplash - a film on jazz drumming - which made horsemouth glad he was never that serious a musician - bullying in the musicspace, games of affection, that urge to be the best. it is (horsemouth suggests) a good dad/ bad dad movie with the hero born again after his struggle with the bad dad of culture (kind of like platoon) . there is of course no ‘out’ to this system (he cannot go off and play in a rock band instead, he cannot return to his biological dad who watches french movies and to the rest of the family who do not appreciate him).

the drumming is of course excellent - this was the main thing that horsemouth liked about jazz (not having the harmonic knowledge or a good enough ear to appreciate properly what was going on in the top line) - art blakey, max roach, elvin jones, ‘philly’ jo jones - it fed into (and misdirected) his appreciation of early jungle.

horsemouth (of course) no longer rages - in truth he’d just like a quiet life - but the universe won’t give it to him

what will you find in the horsemouth folk archive this january?

two ravens ' making an hideouse and unusuall noyse ' 

‘they have destroyed everything even down to the last memory’

 'craft beer is the crack cocaine of gentrification'  

‘bee not dismayed at the signes of Heaven, they are signes butt not to be feared.’ 
the thames foaming with blood

pay no attention to the mule

heretical essays on the philosophy of history

a prescient series of apocalypses

the seven ambiguities. 

the seven souls. 

the most evil man in britain on his waking stick.

on anthropology, on ethnomethodology nonny no... as if performed by chumbawumba hiding out in the wilds of bethnal green

at 3am horsemouth faded suddenly and had to go for a lie down. 

two ravens (' making an hideouse and unusuall noyse. ')

horsemouth would like to share with you this murder story from myddle written down in about 1701 by the reverend gough which displays the preternatural intelligence of ravens.

‘There was one Thomas Elks, of Knockin, who had an elder brother, who married and had one son, and soone after died and his wife abo, and left the child very yong. The grandmother was gardian to the child.. This grandmother was mother unto Thomas Elks, and was soe indulgent of him, that shee loved him best of any of her children ; and by supplying him with money to feed his extravagances, shee undid him. But when shee was gon poore, and could not supply him, hee con- sidered that this child stood in his way beetween him and the estate, and therefore contrived to remove him: and to that end hee hired a poore boy, of Knockin, to entice the child into the come feilds to gather flowers.

 The corn was then att highest Thomas Elks mett the two children in in the feilds ; sent the poore boy home, and took the child in his armes into the lower end of the feild where hee had provided a pale of water, and putting the child's head into the pale of water hee stifled him to death, and left him in the corn. Att evening, the child was missing, and much inquiry made for him. The poore boy tould how his umcle had hired him to entice the child into the corn feilds, and there tooke him away in his arms. The people suspected that the child was murdered, and searched the come feild. They found the child, wheather buryed or not or wheather hee intended to bury him that night, I know not. Elks fled, and tooke the -roade directly for London. (I thinke hee was a journeyman shoemaker.) The neighbours had intelligence which way hee went, and sent two men to pursue him, who followed him almost to London ; and as they were passing on the roade neare Mimmes, in Hertfordshire, they saw two ravens sitt upon a cocke of hay, pulling the hay with theire beaks, and making an hideouse and unusuall noyse. Upon this, the two men alighted, from theire horses and went over to see what the matter was, and there they found Tom Elks fast asleep in the cocke of hay, and apprehended him, who beeing tormented with the horror of a guilty conscience, confessed that these two ravens had followed him continually from the time that hee did the fact. Hee was brought backe to Shrewsbury, and there tryed, condemned, and hanged on a Gibbet, on Knockin Heath.’

horsemouth has survived the week and is now worrying about how origen can be a church father but not a saint. he will faff about the flatlike an old person until he gets too bored and then he will go for a walk.