Why is John Fahey So Boring?

(and yet...)

lol that is kinda good.

I'm into it

had he lived a few more years would fahey have made a vaporwave record

IDK, but "american primitive synthesizer" is a concept I have thought-experimented with

^^ go straight to Sun Ra's "Space Probe"!

Re: "American primitive synthesizer" - https://hanklebury.bandcamp.com/album/delta-drone

this sounds cool! is it ... real?

oh haha, i see that it isn't. still sounds good!

"*Don't believe everything you read, folks. I'm just indulging in a little imaginative exercise with this project--HT"

you need an inauthentic backstory to be authentically american primitive!

I think I mentioned my love of “Funeral Song for Mississippi John Hurt” upthread off Of Rivers and Religion – but I just realized that I think what I love most about it is the moment it changes to the B-section.

It has the same elated feeling of tension and release as (wait for it) James Brown’s “Sex Machine” (or a few years later,“There It Is”) – where the vamp of the verse just goes and goes and goes, building and building, before WHAM the modulation happens and the skies open and ... wow. It’s just a beautiful all-time moment for Fahey in a career that was really filled with them.

it's one of his best pieces, i personally love the herky jerky hi-fidelity version on 'of rivers and religion', close to definitive

Agreed -- I've been doing some modular synthesizer interpretations of Fahey tunes and am working off of the Requia version for this one, which has a completely different structure and starts with the B section. He doesn't get into the long, pedal-pointy A-section that leads the Of Rivers and Religion version until over two minutes in. It's a great piece all the same, but the tension and release I described upthread is totally different.

they're both great and the contrast between them makes me appreciate both more. requia one has a more classical/flowing feel, the beginning is so light and gorgeous

he had such a light touch in the 60s. it's so amazing to watch his picking hand on those 'guitar guitar' appearances

yeah he quite suddenly got a lot heavier sometime around 1969

that can happen when all you do is sit around all day playing guitar

I wouldn't rule out the influence of alcohol either

And trauma/mental illness

it's a rich tapestry!

Happy birthday JF.

I was recently discussing what made him so great with some friends and one friend dissented that all of the talent was in his right hand. All of us were pretty dismissive at first but after thinking it over for a couple weeks, I realized that my friend had some merit in his critique. My arguement is that you need to fold in the chord-structure/choices/voicings of these tunings into his left hand "technique", which then elevates his talent.

What is the best example of his left hand technique. Any serious heads want to tackle this?

brenda's blues

but i don't think that's a valid 'dissent' in any case

obviously he didn't go in for fast runs or hammer-ons or loads of wild awkward chords but a lot of what makes for a good guitarist cannot be assigned to either hand, and ofc fahey was a composer and synthesizer and so on too. his picking patterns aren't wildly complicated but the key business of timing is mostly a right hand thing so I think you can make a case on that basis. brenda's blues is a good call, yellow princess is probably his fanciest left hand era, stuff like lion, but really his slide stuff is what I would point to, esp the live performances

Thank you both. Will see these numbskulls tomorrow night at the Fennesz show and will bring up your examples.

People should stop worshipping Fahey and give credit to the blues musicians he ripped off. There, I said it!

— Sarah Louise (@SarahLouisemusi) June 12, 2020

"ripped off, streamlined and codified the techniques, thus sucking the life out of the music"

more proof these kids never got it for those who couldn't tell from the music

what a confusing revival.

guess I just find it funny that ppl are acting like john fahey, who dedicated so much of his life to championing and popularising country blues, writing about it extensively (he won a grammy for mythologising other ppl!), tracking down skip james and bukka white, finding rare records, and just getting it in a way that ppl hadn't really before and even with his example many still can't, somehow operated at the expense of blues artists

Black-and-white thinking iirc.

ogmor i thought more or less the same thing. it's like, how can you engage with john fahey to an extent that can be meaningfully called "worship" and not be aware of the extent of his commitment to the tradition he was so clearly and self-consciously participating in ?

anyway, if you want to hear what lifeless white folk guitar sounds like, head straight to her bandcamp page !

I've overcome enough of my antipathy to new age to say that as sun-swallowing dazzling reverie goes I quite like sarah louise & I think she stands out, but that tweet is steaming ignorance. mb there are a significant number of oddly annoying john fahey fans in the US, but the resentment ppl feel towards him is clearly not for the nonsense (and indeed rockist) reasons put forward in that thread. by far the most perceptive and most ruthless takedowns of john fahey i've heard all came from john fahey, who was mb more self-aware and self-ironizing than any musician i can think of, but just as the subtleties of his playing have gone unappreciated as his music has been interpreted as "aimlessly jamming and playing around w/ blues cliches in open tunings", all the care he put into negotiating the position of his own music amongst his peers and influences has been reduced to "self-mythologising"

you could say this reductive process is a necessary part of how influence functions, the way in which culture travels on the "vibrational level", to borrow a concept from noted blues scholar john fahey

might be a few good reasons we could cancel john fahey, but ripping off the blues is pretty low on the list.

wait, that tweet wasn't satirical?

I think it all stems from her performing and being on the I'll fated panel at the 1000 Incarnations of the Rose festival

jf really deserves a better thread title.

also ogmor otm

wait, yeah i think Austin is right, it's a bad joke ? there's no way she's that stupid.

the I'll fated panel at the 1000 Incarnations of the Rose festival

?

and this revive continues its outright confusing tendencies.

john would have dug this revive quite a bit, i reckon.

Budo on my phone right now will recount when I'm on my laptop

ah yeah if she was front and centre to witness the old cranks desperate to get their piece of the Fahey legacy pie and she wasn't even especially fussed about him in the first place that makes sense

if you really see fahey as just another 'great fingerpicker'* then ofc the fact that he birthed a whole mini-industry (& one with sufficient gravity to suck in&bemuse ppl who have little in common with fahey beyond being fingerpickers) and elizabeth cotten didn't is a weird mystery that can either prompt closer examination, or the decision that it must just be privilege & structural racism doing their thing w/ a big-helping of 'self-mythologising'

*this is mb the reduction I find most salient in identifying what irks abt the trends in last decade or so of these post-rose guitarists: just talking about players and this jam-band-adjacent focus on craft and raw sound and immediacy (even VIBES) to the exclusion of all the other things that were in the mix. you cld def trace a lot of this to jack rose, and then it felt fresh to me, but with each iteration it just seems to get emptier and blander and less aware; the problem with the vibrational level of influence is you end up with mindless entropic heat death (rather than being consciously embraced as a method of transcendent self-abnegation a la alvin lucier).

xps to map we do have the other regular thread but it's S/D

Search and Destroy: John Fahey

this thread ofc was started by some random lurker/sock/troll, but it seems appropriate to use for discussing people's take on his legacy idk

I'm not on Twitter. Has there been much pushback on this tweet? I'm guessing no

I love the music of John Fahey and I love the music of Alvin Lucier. And rumpy riser's post is the first time I've ever seen heard them both mentioned in the same discussion. Artistic and idiosyncratic geniuses?

more like two over-hyped exemplars of privilege. ppl should stop worshipping lucier and give credit to the first early humans who felt a transcendental tranquility as they contemplated their mortality and the limits of their self as they listened to the echoes of their voice bouncing off the rocks of the great rift valley

there's some but also a lot of Wikipedia experts who want a pat on the head for knowing who Bukka White is


fwiw I very much like Sarah Louise's music

(xpost to Paul)

ums what's the festival story ?