FAUN FABLES / Family Album (Drag City)
Dawn McCarthy has unfortunately slipped under the radar of all the
underground publicity hype machines and hardly ever mentioned in the same
breath as all the other neo-folkies worshipped and adored by scenesters.
The question is why? Is she too weird for "New Weird America?" Dawn the
Faun's records and live performances are severely magnificent; her voice
which
ranges from delicate whisper to husky bellow is rivetting; her dark, yet
animated songs are full of amazing imagery, and while she evokes the spirits
of some of the great folk godparents people are aping these days (Shirley
Collins etc.) she transforms the music into something so unique and personal.
A recent live show started out with her and her partner Nils Frykdahl (of the
equally esoteric Sleepytime Gorilla Museum) taking tea before erupting into
ritualistic clog dance. Talk about a way to open a show. On stage they
lulled everyone into submission with
acoustic guitars, autoharps and strings, while alternately spooking the
bejesus
out of all with passages of clanging cacophany. And someone dressed like an
old
woman creaked up onto the stage midsong and sat down in a rocking chair. On
this
record, Dawn and a cast of dozens weave a tapestry of sound with
congregational
vocals, gamelan, glockenspiel, cello, dogs (!), crows and wolves (!!) and
she even thanks Laura Ingalls Wilder in the liners. And woven through it
all are allegiances to family, yearing for innocence, addressing old age,
love, death, familiar topics, yet presented in a very unprecedented
way.
HANS EDLER / Elektron Kukeso (Boy Wonder)
Sent by a Swedish listener, this newly issued CD is a very bizarre
addition to ever-growing pile of excavated electronic laboratory
weirdo/wonders that our listeners have grown to know and love over the
years. Originally released in 1971, this is being touted as Sweden's first
electronic pop record, produced in Stockholm's EMS studios which housed a
gigantic computer stretching 30 feet long. Edler's Brian Wilson
sensibilities mixed with his technical no-know produced this odd gem of
gurgling, primitive electronics with some very melodic layers of sounds
(inclduing vocals in Swedish). It's an odd, and very endearing
juxtaposition.
TENJO SAJIKI / Den'en Ni Shisu
(Showboat/Sky Station)
A nice example of the recent flood of late 1960's-early 1970's psych
reissues from Japan that are in the more theatrical vein. The period saw
political upheaval and protesting amidst much of the country's students
and youth; and while the underground movements weren't as widespread
as say those in the USA, the pockets of artistic institutions that
responded to political causes (like the decimation of natural resources to
make way for Tokyo's airport, for example), responded in musical and
theatrical activities that drew on their own tradition as much as those
from the West. Rock and roll in Japan started to morph into some very weird
pools of gunk, as documented by bands like the Lost Araaf (with Keiji Haino),
and Les Rallizes Denudes, who took their cues from the free elements of the
Western underground (Velvets, Doors, Albert Ayler). The Tokyo Kid Brothers
added very theatrical elements to their Faust-like approach to psychedelic
rock, and this record too is a monster from 1974. Tenjo Sajiki was an
extreme-theater kind of group formed by poet/activist/filmmaker Shuji
Terayama, and this is the soundtrack to a film with them scored by psych
greats JA Caesar. Gorgeous passages of booming voices singing Japanese
traditional music, mixed with pounding passages of Magma-ish complexity and
fuzzed out guitar excursions. Really varied, beautiful stuff.
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