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$13.99 CD
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JOHN FAHEY
The Mill Pond
(Important)
 "Garbage"
"The Mill Pond Drowns Hope"
Over the past two decades, John Fahey's melodic, rambling Takoma releases of the late '50s to early '70s have come full circle from mild obscurity to being regarded as instrumental in American music history. This 10th anniversary reissue of The Mill Pond allows a wider audience to be exposed to one of the bleakest, and perhaps most uncertain, periods of Fahey's life -- the mid-'90s, when health problems were numerous and he was living alone and recording in a motel room in Salem, Oregon -- just a few years, coincidentally, before he achieved popular recognition. These four songs, originally released as a double 7" during the first years of Fahey's comeback, immediately went out of print.
Firmly entrenched in Fahey's electric slide guitar experiments, The Mill Pond is a brooding, repetitive, and minimal slice of Fahey's essential body of work. "Ghosts" is an Eastern-influenced meditation featuring the artist's distinctive, informal strumming rhythms and, most notably, Fahey's throat-singing debut. "Garbage," with electronic contributions by Jeff Allman, is a super-contemporary, nearly 11-minute noise opus weighed down by reverb-y guitar peals, in which Fahey sounds not unlike Thurston Moore in his expert ability to shelter multiple layers of equally persistent melodies within a shell of feedback. In its four variations, The Mill Pond, with its drowning, sparse melodies and tormented vocals, might actually convince you that more than this re-issue has come back from the dead.
Important Records proudly presents this limited collector's package of The Mill Pond recordings -- including an extensive booklet collecting 32 of John Fahey's paintings for the very first time -- all housed in a deluxe letterpressed jacket which features the same striking cover art as the original double 7". [KS] |
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Antipop Consortium
