School of the Flowers: 2013

Friday, July 12, 2013

Patrick Lundborg experiences transcendence in Donovan’s psychedelic folk music for children

Sometimes it doesn’t take more than a few inspired phrases to create an otherworldly mood. Sometimes all it takes is eight words:

How sad
The farm lad
Deep in play

The image of the little farm boy is stark, evasive; its meaning refuses to stay fixed but keeps changing, like a psychedelic pattern. It is an image that appears internally, in the mind’s eye, rather than the external hallucination of a living carpet or dancing tree canopy.

With a sparseness that some might call Japanese, Donovan places a vision inside your head, then makes it psychedelic. With those eight words, at least three different emotions are evoked, pulling in different directions. As a listener I am made ready for sadness, then nostalgia, but what I finally receive is a contradictory picture of meditation and joy. The surreal ambivalence of the stanza rests upon the final word play, which becomes a pivot, a point of gravity. Replace play with grief, and the delicate balancing act collapses into sentimentality. Instead the lyric forms an endless riddle, a Moebius strip of questions involving the simple words sad, play, deep. Each word alters the emotional charge of the vision so profoundly that it adopts a state of perpetual change, ambiguously flowing back and forth between the shifting moods.

“Isle Of Islay” first appeared on the second disc of the 1967 double album A Gift From A Flower To A Garden. Released as a standalone LP under the title For Little Ones in the USA, the record was intended as a concept album for children. In spite of such humble origins, it turned out to be not only a near masterpiece (surpassed only by Sunshine Superman), but the birth of a new genre. Donovan had experimented with the marriage between acoustic folk music and psychedelic modalities on album tracks like the delightful “Legend Of A Girl Child Linda” and the visually evocative “Sand And Foam”, but with

For Little Ones he temporarily surrendered all rock ambitions to concentrate entirely on this wistful, surreal folk with an occasional Eastern touch.

During a 1967 meditation retreat in India, “Isle Of Islay” became an anthemic number among Donovan’s fellow hippies. His Indian guru recognised it as a “transcendental song”, while Donovan more modestly suggested that it might bring the listener “to the edge of transcendence”. Indeed it does. Each time I hear it, I feel as though time has ceased to exist.

“Isle Of Islay” contains only 60 words, and it is a wonder of concentrated craftsmanship. It opens with the island as seen from a seagull’s point of view, high in the sky, then shifts into the perception of a single grain of sand on the beach. The radical change of perspective is mirrored in the musical arrangement, accenting the tonal drop from the opening chords to the last ones, and enforcing this effect even more in the dramatic guitar figure between the verses. The seagulls are part of the ocean, but they are also part of Islay’s beach, where William Blake’s famous line “to see a world in a grain of sand” may invoke a view of Islay as its own world.

Further up the shore we see the farm lad in his complex, psychedelic-childlike state of mind – but Donovan does not linger here. In a manner reminiscent of the later Rilke, he sees no qualitative difference between the people on Islay, or the birds and the sheep, or the landscape itself. The isle is not a human metaphor, but something both more real and harder to grasp. We humans and our existential brooding are merely one stroke on a much wider canvas of experience. It seems almost impossible that Donovan, at the age of 21, could attain such a mature, holistic understanding.

With Zenlike economy, the second verse’s “sheepbell music” introduces animal life, a pastoral lifestyle, and a sound to augment the ocean surf and crying gulls. Donovan’s eyes (and mine and yours) fall upon a single sheep who strays towards the edge of the pasture to look out over the sea, and the singer expresses, in the most gentle way, the sense of not being free and not belonging: “The tide left me here.”

But in the third and final verse, the longing for the ocean is replaced by the comfort of the island. The shore and the pasture are left behind as we enter the forest where songbirds succeed the seagulls, while the sky’s freedom of space gives way for the joy of aesthetic creation. This music is not the ringing bells of the domesticated sheep, but spontaneous song affirming the habitat of an untouched woodland, along with words that imply a homestead: “blessed” and “neat”. Donovan’s lyrics reflect a central theme of the psychedelic experience: the enjoyment of everyday life (on Islay) while awaiting a return to higher transcendence (the ocean).

The song closes with an observation that puts the listener firmly on Islay rather than in some symbolic abstraction, and this is the peat that has been cut up into thousands of bricks to dry and later be collected. This is a late phase in the pastoral biosphere; dead moss found useful by humans after nature has discarded it. When Donovan sings of the cut peat, he recalls the seeds at the beginning of the growth cycle, seeds which in turn recall the grains and pebbles on Islay’s beach.

But the mystery of the farm boy and his inscrutable brooding – “sad… deep in play” – still remains. Donovan’s vocal performance, precise in its otherworldly melancholy, presents an ambiguity much like the image of the boy, highlighting the stroke of sadness. Is the farm lad Donovan himself, deep in play with his attempt to capture the richness of Islay, yet sad because he can never fully succeed? Or is the sadness always there, before the beginning and after the end, and the deep play out of which Donovan’s music arises his way to escape it? If Donovan did not fully mirror the transcendence of Islay, then my attempt to understand the epiphany his timeless song brings will also fail.

 Patrick Lundborg is a Swedish writer whose books include The Age Of Madness and The Acid Archives. His latest book, Psychedelia – An Ancient Culture, A Modern Way Of Life, is published by Lysergia

98 | The Wire (April 2013) | Epiphanies

Glenn Jones on music of John Fahey that really expanded his mind

As a teenager, US guitarist Glenn Jones saw Hendrix, Beefheart and The Stooges live, and was spat on by Janis Joplin, but it was the music of John Fahey that really expanded his mind

Glenn Jones with John Fahey on the former’s key fob from the Kowlon tiki bar, 1989

After discovering Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold As Love in 1967 (described as “a guided tour of Hieronymous Bosch’s Hell” in the weekly supermarket supplement that came in our local newspaper), I began hounding my father for a guitar. I was 14.

Consider that just a few weeks earlier I’d brought home Herman’s Hermits – Their Greatest Hits, and you have some idea how quickly things were changing for me, how many doors were opening and how big the world suddenly seemed. A year later I was taking in Big Brother & The Holding Company from a front row seat at a movie theatre in Jersey City, New Jersey on a rainy Tuesday night, and gloried in Janis Joplin’s spittle spattering my face.

I saw Hendrix play for nearly three hours at what is reckoned to be one of the best concerts he ever gave: the second show with Band Of Gypsys on New Year’s Day 1970 at the Fillmore East. Just a few weeks later at Ungano’s in New York City, Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band blew my little mind – the group was more aggressive, more blindingly intense than any I’ve ever heard, before or since. By the early 70s I was writing letters to Sun Ra and Harry Partch. In 1973 I saw The Stooges at Max’s Kansas City on the second date of the Raw Power tour, and a few months later attended the reopening of the Kitchen at its new location at Broome and Wooster Streets in New York, which was celebrated with two nights of the music of John Cage, with both the composer and Merce Cunningham in attendance. Musical epiphanies were not only possible then, they were practically unavoidable.

I first heard the music of John Fahey in my Life Drawing class at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond in 1971, where I was a first year Fine Arts student. I made a mental note of the name, and on spring break went nosing through the John Fahey bin at Sam Goody’s in Paramus, New Jersey, one of the record stores that had sustained me through my high school years. After poring over the five or six Fahey albums they had in stock, I bought The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party And Other Excursions. I suspect my choice had something to do with the cover. It gave off that whiff of obscure inscrutability that had so drawn me to ESP records by The Godz, James Zitro and The Holy Modal Rounders, records that looked as otherworldly as they sounded.

I didn’t know it at the time, but The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party was Fahey’s most experimental album to date. The recordings, made between 1962 and 65, find John toying with knotty dissonance (“Guitar Excursion Into The Unknown”), backwards tapes (“Knotts Berry Farm Molly”) and open tunings (the title track is in open G minor). Also included were recordings of Fahey’s guitar accompanied by flute (“900 Miles”), veena (“Sail Away Ladies”) and church organ (“Will The Circle Be Unbroken”). But it is the 19 minute title track that is the album’s outstanding feature. A kind of musical stream of consciousness made up of 11 discrete parts separately recorded and then cobbled together (with all the seams still showing), it unfolds very slowly, as so many of Fahey’s works do, its heavily reverbed opening chords giving way to syncopated picking. The ascending/descending pattern that begins after 38 seconds still gives me goosebumps, as does the section played with a slide beginning at 10'25".

What was Fahey trying to convey with this piece? Resignation? Triumph? Fear? At the time, Fahey said (tongue in cheek?) that it that expressed “...futility, a hopelessness and general existential despair complicated by ontological absurdity.” In the 90s, when Fahey was routinely trashing his earlier works, he called it “a histrionic, disorganised outpouring of blather”. Whatever; here commenced my mania for the music of John Fahey.

What didn’t I get from John? From him, I discovered open tunings. I began playing with my thumb and two fingers instead of with a pick. I began trying to syncopate the way he did. I fell in love with the prewar blues, gospel and hillbilly recordings that had so influenced him. More importantly, my preconceptions about what was required to play music were shattered. After hearing Fahey, I understood that all you needed was the will to play: you didn’t have to be in a group; you didn’t need lots of expensive equipment; you didn’t need to write lyrics or sing; and you didn’t need formal musical training. One person with an instrument could tell stories.

I finally met John in 1978. We became friends, writing to each other and talking over the phone. He played Boston once or twice a year and stayed with me whenever he was in town.

In 1989, I formed Cul De Sac. We covered John’s “The Portland Cement Factory At Monolith, California” on ECIM, our debut album. I vividly recall playing our version of the song for John (with much trepidation) in my car, in the middle of a rain storm in the parking lot of the Kowloon, a tiki bar-cum-restaurant-cum-comedy club in Saugus, Massachusetts. As the windows grew foggier, Fahey made me play the track again and again.

And, in the way things happen, this led to Cul De Sac’s 1996 collaboration with John, The Epiphany Of Glenn Jones, an album Fahey titled and which I’ve written about at length elsewhere.

Today, more than four decades after that trip to Sam Goody’s, I am one person with an instrument trying to tell stories. John’s music still makes me feel like no one else’s. There are things about it I still don’t understand. I still puzzle at some of what he came up with, and at some of the choices he made. But after The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party nothing was ever the same.  Glenn Jones’s My Garden State is released this month on Thrill Jockey

98 | The Wire (May 2013) | Epiphanies

Nancy Elizabeth - Simon Says Dance

Nancy Elizabeth - Simon Says Dance (single version)
Original version can be found on Dancing (2013)

http://nancyelizabeth.co.uk
http://theleaflabel.com/nancyelizabeth
http://twitter.com/nancynancybeep
http://facebook.com/nancybeep

Produced by BLOC+BLUR Creative Studio
http//blocandblur.com
http://BLOCandBLUR

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Kimya Dawson - Simple Folk Radio Session

Kimya Dawson - Simple Folk Radio Session

Kimya Dawson In session for http://www.simplefolkradio.com/ and http://www.galapagospresents.com/

The Tallest Man on Earth - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

The Tallest Man on Earth performs live in the KEXP studio. Recorded on September 9, 2012.

Songs:
Wind and Walls
Lost My Shape (David Bazan cover)
1904
Leading Me Now

Host: Stevie Zoom
Audio Engineer: Julian Martlew
Cameras: Jim Beckmann, Scott Holpainen & Jenna Pool
Editing: Jim Beckmann

thumbnail photo by Dave Lichterman

http://www.kexp.org/
http://www.thetallestmanonearth.com/

The Lumineers - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

The Lumineers perform live in the KEXP studio. Recorded April 2, 2012.

Songs:
Flowers in Your Hair
Ho Hey
Dead Sea
Stubborn Love

http://www.kexp.org/
http://thelumineers.com/

The Shins - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

James Mercer of The Shins performs live in the KEXP studio. Recorded 2/10/2012.

Songs:
Australia
September
Simple Song
It's Only Life

http://www.kexp.org/
http://www.theshins.com/

Oh Land - Sun Of A Gun (Live at Home House Live)

The Barr Brothers - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

The Barr Brothers perform live in the KEXP studio. Recorded 11/7/11.

Setlist:
Beggar in the Morning
Old Mythologies
Ooh, Belle
Give the Devil Back His Heart

Silversun Pickups - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

Silversun Pickups perform live in the KEXP studio. Recorded on May 11, 2012.

Songs:
Bloody Mary
The Pit
Dots and Dashes
Mean Spirits

Host: Cheryl Waters
Audio Engineer: Kevin Suggs
Cameras: Jim Beckmann & Scott Holpainen
Editing: Jim Beckmann

http://www.kexp.org/
http://silversunpickups.com/

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Charlie Parr - Simple Folk Radio Session

all songs performed by
Charlie Parr
www.charlieparr.com

in session for
Simple Folk Radio
www.simplefolkradio.com

John Doe - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

John Doe performs "Giant Step Backward" live in the KEXP studio. Recorded 8/22/2011

Tracks:
Handsome Devil
Sweetheart
Lucky Penny
Giant Step Backwards

http://www.kexp.org
http://www.theejohndoe.com/

The Walkabouts - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

The Walkabouts perform live in the KEXP studio. Recorded 1/8/2012.

Setlist:
My Diviner
Soul Thief
Long Drive in a Slow Machine
Horizon Fade

Host: Stevie Zoom
Engineer: Kevin Suggs
Cameras: Jim Beckmann, Shelly Corbett & Justin Wilmore
Editing: Jim Beckmann

http://www.kexp.org/
http://www.thewalkabouts.com/

Kopecky Family Band - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

Kopecky Family Band perform "Angry Eyes" live in the KEXP studio. Recorded 9/27/2011.

Setlist:
Howlin' At The Moon
Birds
Animal
Angry Eyes

http://www.kexp.org/
http://kopeckyfamilyband.com/

David Bazan - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

David Bazan performs live in the KEXP studio. Recorded 7/18/2011

Tracks:
Eating Paper
Virginia
People
Strange Negotiations

Crooked Fingers - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

Crooked Fingers performs live in the KEXP studio. Recorded 11/21/2011.

Songs
Typhoon
Doctors of Deliverance
War Horses
Bad Blood

Chuck Prophet - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

Chuck Prophet & The Mission Express performs live in the KEXP studio. Recorded 2/22/2012.

Setlist:
The Left Hand and the Right Hand
Willie Mays Is Up At Bat
Temple Beautiful
White Night Big City
Castro Halloween

http://chuckprophet.com/

Joseph Arthur - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

Joseph Arthur performs live in the KEXP studio. Recorded 9/27/2011.

Gypsy Faded 00:40
Almost Blue 08:18
Horses 18:00
I Miss The Zoo 24:55

Host: Cheryl Waters
Engineer: Kevin Suggs
Cameras: Jim Beckmann, Shelly Corbett & Jordan Salazar
Editing: Jim Beckmann

http://www.josepharthur.com/
http://www.kexp.org/

Wooden Shjips - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

Wooden Shjips perform live in the KEXP studio. Recorded 8/27/2011.

Host: DJ Shani
Engineer: Julian Martlew
Cameras: Jim Beckmann, Shelly Corbett & Luke Knecht
Editing: Jim Beckmann

http://www.kexp.org
http://www.woodenshjips.com/

Pontiak - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

Pontiak performs live in the KEXP studio. Recorded on April 18, 2012.

Tracks:
Royal Colors
North Coast
Part III
The Expanding Sky

http://www.kexp.org
http://www.brotherspontiak.com/

Andrew Bird - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

Andrew Bird performs live in the KEXP studio. Recorded April 9, 2012.

Songs:
Give It Away
Danse Caribe
Orpheo Looks Back
Eyeoneye

http://www.kexp.org/
htttp://www.andrewbird.net/

Blowing In The Wind (Live On TV, March 1963)

Bob Dylan - Knockin' on Heaven's Door

Bob Dylan - Like A Rolling Stone (ORIGINAL)

Bob Dylan - Like A Rolling Stone (ORIGINAL)

Recorded on June 15-16, 1965, Columbia Studio A, 799 Seventh Avenue, New York City. Claimed as the greatest song ever written by Rolling Stone Magazine's "The Greatest 500 Songs of All Time".

Lyrics:
Lyrics:
Once upon a time you dressed so fine,
Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you ?
People'd call, say, "Beware doll, you're bound to fall,"
You thought they were all a'kiddin' you.
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hangin' out.
Now you don't talk so loud,
Now you don't seem so proud,
About having to be scrounging your next meal.

How does it feel ?
How does it feel ?
To be without a home ?
Like a complete unknown ?
Like a rolling stone ?

Aw, you've gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely,
But you know you only used to get "juiced" in it.
Nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street,
And now you're gonna have to get used to it.
You say you never compromise
With a mystery tramp, but now you realize
He's not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And say, "Do you want to make a deal?

How does it feel ?
How does it feel ?
To be on your own ?
With no direction home ?
A complete unknown ?
Like a rolling stone ?

Aw, you never turned around to see the frowns
On the jugglers and the clowns
When they all did tricks for you.
You never understood that it ain't no good,
You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you.
You used to ride on a chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat.
Ain't it hard when you discover that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you everything he could steal ?

How does it feel ?
How does it feel ?
To have ya' on your own ?
With no direction home ?
Like a complete unknown ?
Like a rolling stone ?

Aw, princess on the steeple and all the pretty people
They're all drinkin', thinkin' that they've got it made.
Exchanging all precious gifts,
But you'd better take your diamond ring, you'd better pawn it babe.
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used.
Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse.
When you ain't got nothing, you've got nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you've got no secrets to conceal.

How does it feel ?
Aw, how does it feel ?
To be on your own ?
With no direction home ?
Like a complete unknown ?
Like a rolling stone ?

Charlie Parr - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

Charlie Parr performs "Jubilee" live in the studio during KEXP's The Roadhouse. Recorded March 26, 2012.

Songs:
Jubilee
Daniel in the Lion's Den
When First Unto This Country
Jesus Met the Woman at the Well
Just Like Today

http://www.kexp.org/
http://www.charlieparr.com/

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy "I See A Darkness"

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy "I See A Darkness"

First video from the Bonnie 'Prince' Billy EP "Now Here's My Plan", released July 24, 2012.
Directed by Ben Berman.

Bonnie Prince Billy - Full Performance (Live on KEXP)

Bonnie "Prince" Billy performs live in the KEXP studio. Recorded on June 13, 2012.

Whipped
Night Noises
I See A Darkness
How About Thank You

http://www.kexp.org/
http://www.bonnieprincebilly.com/

John Fahey - Poor Boys Long Way From Home

John Fahey - Poor Boys Long Way From Home

1978 Hamburg

John Fahey - Red Pony 1969

John Fahey - Red Pony 1969

John Fahey is truly an American guitar legend.

His style has been greatly influential and has been described as American Primitive, a term borrowed from painting and referring mainly to the self-taught nature of his art.

Fahey himself borrowed from the folk and blues traditions of America but incorporated classical, Brazilian, Indian and abstract music into his eclectic oeuvre. In 2003, he was ranked 35th in Rolling Stone's "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".

Label Site: http://www.burnsiderecords.com
My Space: http://www.myspace.com/bluesonburnside

John Fahey - On the Sunny Side of the Ocean

John Fahey - Take a Look at That Baby

John Fahey - Candy Man

John Fahey - Candy Man

1978 hamburg germany

John Fahey - Requiem For Mississippi John Hurt

John Fahey - Requiem For Mississippi John Hurt

The best John Fahey performance of "Requiem for Mississippi John Hurt", based on an old spiritual, "Jesus is a Dying-Bed Maker" most notable performed by Charley Patton.

John Fahey sings! - Poor Boy Blues (Rare Fonotone Recording)

John Fahey sings! - Poor Boy Blues (Rare Fonotone Recording)

Recorded under the name "Blind Thomas" Nov 15, 1959.

Early John Fahey, with some singing too! You might recognise the first picture as well, as it is the photo used for the cover of Fahey's first album "The Legend of Blind Joe Death."

"Poor Boy A Long Way From Home" taught by John Fahey

"Poor Boy A Long Way From Home" taught by John Fahey

John Fahey (aka Blind Joe Death) teaches "Poor Boy A Long Way From Home." From the DVD "The Guitar of John Fahey Vol. 2."

John Fahey - Requiem for John Hurt

Off "Requia" album (1968)

Not to be confused with Requiem for Mississipi John Hurt.

TABS
http://www.johnfahey.com/TabRequiemfo...

Current 93 - Time Tryeth Truth

ALBUM : '' EARTH COVERS EARTH '' 1988
Re released in 1992 in CD format

LYRICS :

" If I cast my eyes before me, what an
Infinite space in which i do not exist;
And if I look behind me, what a terrible
Procession of years in which I do not
Exist, and how little space i occupy in
This vast abyss of time..."

Like to the falling of a Starre;
Or as the flights of Eagles are;
Or like the fresh spring's gawdy hew;
Or silver drops of morning dew;
Or like a wind that chafes the flood;
Or bubbles which on water stood;
Even such is man, whose borrow'd light
Is straight call'd in, and paid to night

The Wind blowes out; the Bubble dies;
The Spring entomb'd in Autumn lies;
The Dew dries up; the Starre is shot;
The Flight is past; and Man forgot

The wind blows out and the bubble dies
The spring entomb'd in autumn lies
The dew dries up and the starre is shot
The flight is past and man forgot

And earth covers earth
And time tryeth truth

Earth covers earth
Time tryeth truth

Current 93 - Earth Covers Earth

Current 93 - Beausoleil

Artist: Current 93
Album: Swastika for Goddy
Song: Beausoleil

Current 93 - Oh Coal Black Smith

Current 93 - Oh Coal Black Smith

Current 93 - Swastikas For Noddy
Label:
L.A.Y.L.A.H. Antirecords
Belgium
Released:
1988

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Scott Kelly - The Passage

Official Music Video for "The Passage" from "Spirit Bound Flesh" (2001), first solo album from Scott Kelly. Directed and Edited by Pedro Agra & André Gonçalves. http://www.invertstudio.com

Friday, July 12, 2013

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Sunday, March 17, 2013

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Sunday, February 24, 2013