Why is John Fahey So Boring?

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lol it only took 17 years, but we finally cracked the case of why john fahey is so boring ... it was jim o'rourke's fault!

tylerw, Thursday, 15 June 2023 15:53 (ten months ago) link

Ha, that’s brilliant. Yeah, as I said, it wasn’t a fair assessment on my part. Jim O may have been guilty of many sins—including luring a lot of his heroes out of retirement in the mid-90s to make boring, kind of similar sounding records—but tanking those releases to make his own music sound better isn’t one of them.

Naive Teen Idol, Thursday, 15 June 2023 20:00 (ten months ago) link

I believe in Dance of Death it was intimated that Fahey, due to health issues, wasn't capable of playing his old material very well at that point.

Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, 15 June 2023 21:35 (ten months ago) link

two weeks pass...

More on xpost Proofs and Refutations---from Drag City, so adjust your shades and brains accordingly---at least they start with a track (hearable via several links, but I'll go w this)
https://thejohnfahey.bandcamp.com/track/evening-not-night-pt-2

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a3766545716_10.jpg

Recorded in 1995 and 1996, mostly in John Fahey’s room at a Salem, Oregon boardinghouse, the performances on Proofs and Refutations prefigure the ornery turn of the page that marked Fahey’s final years, drawing another enigmatic rabbit from his seemingly bottomless musical hat.

Right out of the gate, Fahey re-materializes before us, somewhere between Oracle of Delphi and Clown Prince at Olympus. Portions of this material appeared on obscure late ‘90s vinyl in the 7” or double-78 rpm format, but as a “session” it has lain dormant more than a quarter century now. Taken together, we can now see these tracks as secret blueprints to latter-day Fahey provocations, several years prior to records like 1997’s City of Refuge and Womblife. Proofs and Refutations is cloaked in the language of dogma -– what is he proving? refuting? –- this is Fahey dancing a jig in the Duchampian gap, jester cap bells a-jingling. True believers? He’s got something for you: an uncompromising vision that you can sneer at or embrace as evidence of his genius. Skeptics? He’s there with you, too: sending up the fallacy of certitudes altogether. Institutions, systems, accepted wisdom. Heroes. Alternative facts, indeed.

Atop lost and found plucks and pickings from the final decade of Fahey’s legendary career sits "Evening, Not Night (Pt. 2)"– sounding as ruthlessly iconoclastic as ever. Here, he wrestles the ghost of Skip James, perhaps to finally force the “bitter, hateful old creep” (his words) back into the grave. He plays with a sense of freedom, aiming for the formative mists beyond the piece at hand, and finding them with ease, in an expansive, unhurried performance.

Proofs and Refutations will be available on LP/digitally on September 8th.

John Fahey Online:

Drag City -https://www.dragcity.com/artists/john-fahey

Pre Order -https://www.dragcity.com/products/proofs-refutations

Stream "Evening, Not Night (Pt. 2)”-http://lnk.to/proofsandrefutations

dow, Friday, 30 June 2023 18:18 (ten months ago) link

ah so it's basically a reissue of The Mill Pond 2x7", I actually like his noise pieces esp those on City Of Refuge

out-of-print LaserDisc edition (sleeve), Friday, 30 June 2023 18:29 (ten months ago) link

When do the lost ‘77 sessions get their proper release? I can’t remember what the story was with them but at least one track was issued on Red Cross.

Naive Teen Idol, Tuesday, 11 July 2023 12:43 (nine months ago) link

four months pass...

https://freshairarchive.org/guests/john-fahey

???

whoa, weird

global tetrahedron, Monday, 13 November 2023 16:29 (five months ago) link

👀👀

citation needed (Steve Shasta), Monday, 13 November 2023 20:10 (five months ago) link

Ok, he is so wrong about the SF Symphony. At time of this interview the new symphony hall was less than one month from opening (due to the $5M gift from Louise Davies), but the symphony itself absolutely existed, sharing space with the opera/ballet at War Memorial. But with John I suspect facts are more of an illusion.

citation needed (Steve Shasta), Monday, 13 November 2023 23:59 (five months ago) link

the transfiguration of terry gross

tylerw, Tuesday, 14 November 2023 19:36 (five months ago) link

I Remember Blind Daniel Schur

Naive Teen Idol, Tuesday, 21 November 2023 01:18 (five months ago) link

wow, anyone heard this Finland-only release from 1968?

https://www.discogs.com/release/12204209-John-Fahey-Finlandia

out-of-print LaserDisc edition (sleeve), Sunday, 26 November 2023 22:00 (five months ago) link


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