From the late 1950s onwards, guitarist John Fahey has forged a unique fusion of traditional American musics and avant-garde conceits, bending blues and folk templates into new forms and dousing them with found sounds. Today, Fahey is flattered by the collaborative attentions of underground guru Jim O’Rourke, Sonic Youth’s ever-adventurous Thurston Moore and experimental rockers…
Andy Partridge of XTC once described record fairs, and more specifically record collectors, as “smelling of broken biscuits”. Butlocating a mint-condition second West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band album or a bootleg of Sonic Youth rehearsing is a difficult job that someone has to do. Be thankful, then, to Phil McMullen and Nick Saloman, publishers…
‘Hair is important,” began Robert Forster, the co-frontman of the Go-Betweens, Australia’s criminally underrated band, in an article on haircare for the Manchester fanzine Debris in 1987. “Hair is placed fairly and squarely upon your head, to be admired and cared for. At a younger age, I almost drifted into hairdressing, and thankfully didn’t, but…
Jim O’Rourke’s latest album, Eureka, features delicately finger-picked acoustic guitar, funereal New Orleans jazz, a Bacharach and David cover, and ambient washes of abstract sound, buoyed up on imaginative string arrangements. It is provocative and intelligent, asks subtle questions about how and why we consume music, yet is tuneful enough to sing in the bath…
Things started to go wrong for Thirteenth Floor Elevators frontman Roky Erickson when he was arrested for possession of six marijuana joints in 1969. Faced with statutory imprisonment by the State of Texas, Roky cunningly pleaded insanity on the basis of having taken 300 LSD trips, and so spent three years in Rusk State Hospital…
You’d think the number of forgotten talents to dig up, canonise and induct into the music hall of fame would be finite. The 1990s have seen the back catalogues of Gram Parsons, Nick Drake and Sandy Denny annotated and anthologised. By now there’s a familiar pattern to these critical resurrections. Stage one involves the CD…