As a longtime fan of the band, i am proud to announce the release of Benguela’s 4th album, ‘Black Southeaster’, via Jaunted Haunts Press. This is also the band’s first new album since 2004′s SUI, coming after an extended hiatus and the improvisational trio’s return to Cape town’s live circuit in 2009. ‘Black Southeaster’ was recorded in a day at the sadly defunct SUI Studios, and then trimmed down with edits and fleshed out again with overdubs.

Black Southeaster launches on Fri the 23rd of July at the Theatre in the District, District 6, after which Benguela embark on an SA tour.

Benguela ‘Black Southeaster’ tour dates:

Fri 23 July:  Album launch at Theater in the District,  District6  (feat Imagemaster Blink & Righard Kapp)

Thurs 29 July:  Tings&Times, Pretoria (feat.Joao Orecchia)

Fri 30 July: The Bioscope,  JHB (feat Joao Orecchia)

Sat 31 July: George Hotel, Eshowe, KZN

Sun 1st Aug: NSA Gallery, DBN (afternoon show)

Sun 1st Aug: Highfield House, DBN (evening)

Wed 4th Aug: Chandlers Underground, East London

Thurs 5 Aug: Beethoven Room, Rhodes,  Grahamstown

Fri 6 Aug:  The Chaplin @ Uptown Theater, PE

Sat 7 Aug: Potter’s Place, Jeffrey’s Bay

Tues 24 Aug: Die Boer, Durbanville

Thurs 2 sept: Speedway 105, Gardens, Cape Town (feat. Righard Kapp)

Dates and venues may still need to be confirmed but i will update these regularly.

Track Previews:

Black Southeaster sample

Killer Frog Fungus sample

Meridian sample

Neap sample

New digital and physical distribution channels will be finalised as the launch approaches, but the best way to procure a copy will still be to catch one of these rare gigs.

Andre van Rensburg – Unfinished Cities

(South of the Border, 2008)

“When he was 6 years old, André van Rensburg strung a guitar string to a plank of wood, attached the other end to his bedroom window bars and yanked the string until it broke. His musical vision has changed little since…”. He has, however, cast a huge shadow in the history of South African leftfield music: his previous projects include the legendary rock trio Supernature (friends of mine from a gig-going generation before me go glassy-eyed when their name is brought up), Ohm (with Brendan Jury), a stint in Battery 9, and the alt-country project Die Menere (with Battery 9 mastermind and One F label boss Paul Riekert). Van Rensburg has since relocated to Taiwan, where he has been pursuing his interest in Eastern melodicism, Derek Bailey’s brittle tone as well as John Zorn’s compositional strategies.

‘Unfinished Cities’ is the second album to contain van Rensburg’s solo compositions, but it features contributions from, among others, violinist Brendan Jury and japanese Koto player Chieko Mori, who mainly provide thin, dissonant backdrops to van Rensburg’s plucky acoustic performances. The opening track ‘Unfinished Cities pt1″ is probably the most seductively melodic piece here, a beautifully winsome composition that nevertheless sets textural tone for the more challenging material that follows.

‘Unfinished Cities’ can be purchased from CDBaby here, and is available in South Africa from One F Music (drop Clair a mail via ‘General Enquiries’).

Andre van Rensburg’s official website is here.

Nels Cline – Coward

(Cryptogramophone, 2009)

Nels Cline is unfortunately best known for being the guitarist of Wilco: a band i’ve just always found too bland to bother with. Yet Cline has a slew of other, less commercially successful projects, in which he explores many other facets of the guitar; such as The Nels Cline Singers.I also remember hearing a track of him playing with saxophonist Paul Flaherty and (my favourite) drummer Chris Corsano, which was just about the most evil, unhinged wall of noise i’ve heard. From what i know, ‘Coward’ is his first solo album, which is quite odd given the length of his career so far but also understandable in the light of his propensity for collaboration.

One of the first things that strike you about ‘Coward’ is the sheer variety of approaches represented on the album: whether this is a good or bad thing depends on whether you are assessing it as a coherent listening experience or whether, like me, you take the breadth of scope to be an almost didactic indication of syntactic possibilities.

Another thing that hits you early on is the fact that Cline has his chops, in the traditional sense. Cline could, if he wanted to, be one of those guys in guitar shops showing off ridiculously complicated licks designed to intimidate prospective young guitarists. The fact that a cluster of later tracks are titled ‘Onan Suite’ might be a wry allusion to this. The lovely acoustic track ‘Prayer Wheel’ centres around a looped motif but plays around it with some impressive, and very effective note runs. The very next track, ‘Thurston County’, however, after cycling through some spidery dissonant arpeggios and glutinous pitch-bent notes, settles into an unabashedly dumbed down two-chord chug that is incredibly ebullient and just so damn good. This is territory that most virtuoso guitarists won’t venture into, but thankfully Cline does. Throughout the rest of the album Cline puts his virtuosity at the service of his compositions, especially on the monumental acoustic piece ‘Rod Poole’s Gradual Ascent to Heaven’, on which sparse motifs evolve slowly into a dissonant frenzy.

Later on in the album, more electronic sound sources and electric guitars come the fore: ‘Onan Suite: Seedcaster’, with it’s lo-fi electronic farts and squawks, sounded so out of character that i thought i’d started listening to a Black Dice album – that alone should be ample testament to how good it is.’Onan Suite: The Liberator’ is another jaunty riff-fest over a straightforward 4/4 drum machine pattern, after which droning closer ‘Cymbidium’ bookends this remarkable album beautifully.

This album is mandatory listening for anyone with an interest in the guitar and its place in future of music.

Read Nels Cline’s notes on ‘Coward’ here.

The launch gig was a wonderful experience, thank you to everyone who contributed to the success of that, particularly The Newspace Theatre and Dirk Hugo for doing the sound. I’ll hopefully have photos and comments up soon.

_______________________________

It can finally be announced: on June the 21st, this press is issuing two new albums simultaneously. Ramon Galvan’s ‘Outer Tumbolia’ and Righard Kapp’s ‘Strung Like A Compound Eye’ are launched on this night at the Newspace Theatre in Long Street, Cape Town. You might want to check out these sample tracks before moving on to read the rest of this press release:

Righard Kapp – Strung Like A Compound Eye

Ramon Galvan – Trying to Tell (Summer House)

back, l-r: Ramon Galvan, Righard Kapp (musicians),front, l-r: Jemima, Ben (cats) photograph by Lauren Fowler

Ramon Galvan is the former vocalist and keyboard player from the avant-rock band blackmilk. He is a self taught guitarist, and uses a similarly experimental approach to other instruments – allowing his unfamiliarity with them to guide his approach to songwriting.

An intimate and delicate blend of arcane folk and bludgeoning menace, these are songs about a future that never arrived, a summer that ended, everyday worries and life long puzzles.Written mostly on guitar, the music is peppered with an array of collected instruments, field recordings and found objects.

His debut solo album, ‘Outer Tumbolia’ maps out a clear emotional geography of loss, longing and acceptance, which is both nostalgic and utopian. It features an incendiary collaboration with Benguela drummer Ross Campbell on its dramatic closer as well as a woozy guitar-loop based melding with Jaunted Haunts label boss and close co-conspirator Righard Kapp.

Live, the Galvan Trio is completed by Pierre Du Plessis on electric guitar and trumpet and Nic Dasilva on bass guitar and music box. Ramon Galvan plays electric guitar, kalimba and autoharp.

Ramon is an admirer of Kate Bush, Scott Walker, Nico and Talk Talk.

Tracklist:

1) Luft
2) Trying to Tell (Summer House)
3) Chang, You
4) Luminarc
5) This is how
6) I Will rise Up
7) Grade by Grade
8 ) You Flossed the Stars
9) The Rupture
10) No Rest

Righard Kapp has dwelled on the outskirts of the South African music scene for several years now: from his own ambient and noise experiments to his involvement with the ‘On the Edge of Wrong’ festival of improvised music to his sporadic tenure with literary oddballs The Buckfever Underground, not to mention his label’s activities of releasing albums by decidedly individualistic artists and his involvement in the recent reissue of the 80’s South African art-punk band KOOS, it is clear that the idiosyncratic guitarist values a critical and aesthetic discourse that is well removed from the mainstream.

“Strung Like A Compound Eye” is his first formal foray into the territory of acoustic guitar composition. Although his experimental leanings can’t help but creep in, they do so in a manner that is viscerally appealing and immediate. Kapp aims to channel his fringe syntax into something that makes sense to the most casual of listeners: a dillettante’s one minute trolley dash through these outskirts of musical expression he calls home.

Ultimately, “Strung Like a Compound Eye” is an argument for the broadening of aesthetic horizons in a time when variety, though technologically feasible, is remarkably absent from our prescribed media diets, and in a country that is falling over its own feet in order to come to terms with its own diverse cultural identity.

The album, engineered, co-produced and mixed by Dirk Hugo, features performances by Ramon Galvan, former KOOS frontman Marcel Van Heerden, The Buckfever Underground frontman Toast Coetzer, Lee Thompson and Christopher Engel of the jazz outfit Restless Natives, Benguela drummer Ross Campbell, The Wild Eyes bassist Gareth Dawson and Ella Joyce Buckley, among several others.

Tracklist:

1. August
2. Strung Like A Compound Eye
3. I’m Gonna Learn To Love Myself
4. Static Recollection 1
5. A Monument to Works
6. The Wedding Song
7. Bring Die Bande Nader
8. ‘n Dun Laken Vernuf
9. Static Recollection 2
10. Little Spies
11. Take Me Under your Wing For the Entire Holiday

The main launch gig takes place on Sunday the 21st of June at Newspace One, in Long Street in Cape Town, which will feaure performances by the Ramon Galvan Trio and Righard Kapp’s full live band consisting of Ramon Galvan (vocals, toys), Ross Campbell (drums), Pierre du Plessis (guitar), and Gareth Dawson (bass).

In order to facilitate seating reservations, we have set up a basic reservation system here. As seats are limited we recommend you book in advance.

The ticket price for the launch gigs are R40.A ticket with one of the albums will set you back R100, and a ticket with both albums will cost R150.

The sage-like South African music writer and former host of the ‘Roots to Fruits’ radio show, Richard Haslop, has announced his top 50 albums for 2008, and Ella Joyce Buckley’s ‘For Astraea’ is on it. Also, along with Jim Neversink’s ‘Shakey is Good’, it’s the only South African album on the list.

The list will be published in the June/July issues of Audio Video Magazine, but the entry on ‘For Astraea’ can be viewed here in the meantime.

Congratulations to Ella, and Jim for that matter.

For the sake of online sales, i’ve registered with the south african pay site SETCOM, which will hopefully prove to be a useful step towards gearing this site for convenient online sales. My shop section can be accessed here, needless to say i will be working toward making online sales as convenient and self-explanatory as possible. Please don’t hesitate to offer any suggestions in this regard.

My apologies for scant and slightly off-topic posting of late. No excuses, barring not having much to say.

It’s taken a bit longer than it should have, but i can finally announce that  the Buckfever Underground live album ‘Limbs Gone Batty’ is now available. Recorded one fine May night at the much missed Independent Armchair Theatre, it’s probably one of the most focused gigs we’ve had in terms of our meandering improvisations coalescing into something approaching recognizable songforms. The album is pressed up in a silkscreened sleeve in an edition of 250. Also, have a free mp3 of ‘The Curator’ on us: i personally think that being dismembered by your lover has never sounded this sexy.

Tracklisting:

1. Letter To The Lonely One
2. The Curator
3. The South African
4. I Saw What Warrick Sony Saw
5. I’m On Facebook, Now What?
6. Teen Maandag Is Ons Dood
7. AIDS Test
8. Die Volk Is In Die Kak
9. The Anterior-Posterior Patterning Signal

I may add at this point that i am investigating avenues for efficient and easy online sales through this site, i hope to have everything in place within the next few weeks, however, if you are desperate for a copy NOW, contact me and we can make an arrangement.

This coming Wednesday, the 18th of March, sees the sole album from legendary South African post-punk band KOOS reissued for the first time on CD, or any format since the album’s limited edition cassette release in 1989.

“Forget about Johannes Kerkorrel and his buddies, KOOS were the truly innovative band whose music defined and reflected South Africa’s increasingly dark eighties. The band was formed in 1986 by conceptual artist Neil Goedhals and actor Marcel Van Heerden, who were joined by Gys de Villiers, Megan Kruskal, Velile Nxazonke and Kendell Geers. The country’s original punk poet Johan van Wyk wrote some of the lyrics.

KOOS was a highly personal reaction to the chaos and despair that had engulfed the country in the mid-eighties. States of emergency, burning townships, murder, bomb attacks and people who “fell from the window” of a police station or “slipped on a piece of soap.” That was the subject matter KOOS sang about in songs like Sing jy van Bomme, Tsafendas and the menacing Die Suid Afrikaanse Herfs, which referenced the German terrorists of the Rote Armee Faktion.

Musically they were miles ahead of the 12 bar blues and folk that had inspired their alternative Afrikaner contemporaries. Their sound was artful anti-rock, fuelled by the noises that had reached Johannesburg from Berlin, Sheffield, Melbourne and Cologne: the metallic motorik and madness of Einstürzende Neubauten, Cabaret Voltaire, Birthday Party and Can, but all done in a unique style that has aged surprisingly well and would now probably be called post-punk. Van Heerden sang, spat and whispered. Sometimes he used pebbles to distort his voice, while Goedhals punished his guitar.

KOOS disbanded in 1990. They had lived through the states of emergency of 1985 and 1986, they had been attacked, their name had partly been appropriated by Andre Letoit who became Koos Kombuis, but they had survived; battered, but unbowed. Then, in 1990, around the time of the release of Nelson Mandela, the group imploded. The country was going through monumental changes. Goedhals didn’t want to perform anymore. There was no big fight, no drama, together they decided to call it a day. The raison d’être was gone. The band had made its statement: that one black tape, wrapped in a brown paper bag to accentuate its illicit content – a nod to the way the American bum must drink his alcohol.

Later that same year, on the 16th of August, on Elvis Presley’s dying-day, Goedhals jumped to his death from the sixth floor of a flat in Yeoville. A few days later came the news that the Johannesburg Art Gallery had bought some of his works. It sounded like a Goedhals prank.

The legend of KOOS wouldn’t rest though. First, Dutch journalist Fred de Vries immortalised them in his well received 80s underground book Club Risiko (Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 2006), where they share pages with international luminaries such as Sonic Youth, Laibach and Einstürzende Neubauten. Second, American underground label, S-S Records, intends to release some of Goedhals’s experimental pre-KOOS recordings later this year.

But most important: here’s the re-mastered version of that legendary collector’s item that Shifty Records released twenty years ago.”

The launch takes place at Warren Siebrits Gallery, 140 Jan Smuts Ave, in Johannesburg.

KOOS – Sloper

It is by now almost a tradition on my side that February is a month that brings many developments and plans to the fore. The most immediate one is the 4th Cape Town instalment of On The Edge of Wrong (the festival also had its first Oslo outing in 2008) , set to take place on the 28th of Feb and 1st of March, again at the Intimate Theatre on Hiddingh Campus. This festival, the initiative of Norwegian guitarist Morten Minothi Kristiansen, aims to present musicians who work at the cutting edge of various disciplines, ranging from jazz to classical to electronic music. Some funding from the Norwegian Jazz Forum and MMINO, a South African-Norwegian Music Exchange body, allows us to present more artists from abroad who are really pushing boundaries. Anyone who witnessed Streifenjunko‘s performance at the 2008 instalment of the festival will testify that the alien sounds the duo conjured out of their horns was a mindfuck of previously unknown proportions.

Clips from their, and other, performances at the festival, shot by Australian electronica artist Andrew Garton, can be viewed here.

The lineup for the 2009 instalment currently looks as follows:

Saturday 28.Feb:

Shane Cooper & Chris Engel

Thundersqueak

Øystein Skar (NO)

“Sonic Duets” feat. Carlo Mombelli & Marcus Wyatt

Sunday 1.March:

Ivan Mazuze, Texito Langa & Gorm Helfjord

The Brydon Bolton Trio

Omenås/Skarbø (NO)

Kyle Shepherd

Tickets are R70 per night (R50 per night for students) OR you can buy a full festival pass for both nights for R120 (R100 for students). Performances will start precisely at 20:00 (please note that the doors will be closed once the performances have commenced) – doors open at 19:00, and there is a cash bar and a lovely outside area to socialize at the Intimate Theatre.

On the label side of things, the major development is that I am currently looking at an April/May launch of my album, and also that Ramon Galvan, who features prominently on it, is also busy wrapping up his own, and that we are looking at launching the two albums simultaneously as well as doing a series of concurrent gigs to promote them.

Ramon Galvan- No Rest

The Buckfever Underground live album, “Limbs Gone Batty: The Role of the Anterior-Posterior Patterning Signal, Sonic Hedgehog, in the Development of the Unique Bat Limb” will also become available during the course of February. The album, which takes its strange title from bassist Gil’s sister Dorit Hockman’s master’s thesis, was recorded at the Independent Armchair Theatre in May 2007, at a gig in which the band’s usually incongruent meanderings gelled into unusually apposite songforms: ‘Letter to the Lonely One’ finds Toast Coetzer’s faltering singing echo Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and builds to an almost orchestral climax (inasmuch as one guitar, bass and drums can be said to approximate ‘orchestral’), while ‘The Curator’ follows a love-as-cannibalism metaphor along a snakelike motif into an eventual feedback morass.
At this point it should also be announced that i have left The Buckfever Underground, owing to other commitments, but that i hope to still work with Toast’s magnificent lyrics in other projects.

The Buckfever Underground – I’ve Joined Facebook, Now What?

Another major development is that i am working in conjunction with Paul Riekert of the One F label, JHB gallerist Warren Siebrits and Marcel Van Heerden, at the previously much hinted at CD reissue of the band KOOS’ 1989 self-titled cassette album. Truly a landmark South African album in my opinion, KOOS were as politicised as many of their peers, but were the only band to really convey the turbulence of those times sonically: as Marcel recalls today, they were making music like what they had imagined punk to sound like. The reissue will be launched at Warren Siebrits’ gallery in Johannesburg on the 18th of March.

KOOS: (l-r) Kendell Geers, Neil Goedhals, Megan Kruskal, Marcel Van Heerden, Gys De Villiers, Velile Nxazonke. Photo by Wayne Oosthuizen

KOOS – Sloper

And then, as promised, here is an mp3 of Ella Joyce Buckley’s great new track ‘Terroir Knot’, for the upcoming Babel Gyve album.

Ella Joyce Buckley -Terroir Knot

Much to take in!

Ex Models – Zoo Psychology

Ex-Models’ 2003 album ‘Zoo Psychology’ is an easy album to dislike: the guitars are razor thin and sound like anglegrinders, there’s not a riff in sight, and singer Shahin Motia’s emasculated yelp seems calculated to annoy the fuck out of anyone who doesn’t consider Adam Ant the second coming of Christ.

Yet, there’s something undeniably compelling about the singlemindedness with which they strip songs down to their bare mechanical skeletons, and the way they nail the atonal scrawl of no-wave bands like Mars, DNA, and, particularly, James Chance and the Contortions, into taut, hyperactive math-rock rhythms.

The pervasive theme on the album is an almost desperate will-to-hedonism, born from an apocalyptic reading of post-structural confusion; i can only describe it  as the sound of someone who found out he has 5 hours to live and decides to spend those hours trying to fuck everything in sight. The unlikely pairing of sex and theory is exemplified in the track ‘Hott 4 Discourse’, while the ‘pretty pretty pink noise’ on the track of the same title, ‘will set you on fire’ – as is screeched in a way that implies a very agonizing form of ecstacy.

Zoo Psychology is best consumed in small doses, but the fact that it races through 14 tracks in less than 25 minutes takes care of that for you.

Stream tracks from Zoo Psychology here

Parts & Labor – Stay Afraid

Parts & Labor’s approach is altogether more anthemic: their songs are quite reminiscent of Mission of Burma,  with a subtly Celtic melodic sensibility to it. What’s not so subtle is the blanket of analog bleeps, groans and squeals that propel these already furious songs into the stratosphere. The album is a relentless jolt out of complacency, with the distressed electronics acting as a kind of shorthand for an information age gone haywire.

Stream Tracks from ‘Stay Afraid’ here

As far as these bands’ subsequent fates are concerned: Ex Models have shed members and careened further down the path of noisy abstraction with the Chrome Panthers album, whilst Parts & Labor have added members, and generally become altogether more docile, although the electronic noise is still present on their subsequent albums, and their 2008 album ‘Receivers‘ makes good on the band’s democratic stance by using noise samples submitted by fans.

Disjointed ramblings on other, more recent albums

Gang Gang Dance – Saint Dymphna initially felt like a letdown after the excellent ‘God’s Money‘ – but then, anything would. After repeated assessment on it’s own terms it became apparent that ‘Saint Dymphna’ is probably the boldest, densest, most literate album yet to adopt such a pop production ethic. The result is something like what the top 40 might sound like in a perfect world.
On the topic of former noiseniks who have cleaned up their act and generally inched closer to mainstream acceptance: i have found Animal Collective‘s two albums after Sung Tongs to be rather ignorable, in fact i don’t think i’ve even listened to either of them all the way through. The Panda Bear solo album ‘Person Pitch’, however, seemed to be mining a very interesting vein, and judging by the single ‘My Girls’, and general critical response, it looks like the new album ‘Merriweather Post Pavilion‘ may be not a return to form so much as an ideal synthesis of years of exploration. The track itself is highly addictive.
Why?‘s 2008 album Alopecia also caught me quite recently, despite having been out for a while, and though it teeters dangerously close to capital ‘I’ Indie at times, the savagely observational lyrics reminds me of Pavement in the best possible way: when Yoni Wolf sings about ‘both of our names and an ampersand embroidered proudly on a kitchen tow el”, the line encompasses both the naivete before and the disillusionment after the fact.
On the more abstract front, there’s Fennesz‘s The Black Sea, the first proper album in a long while from perhaps the most distinctive electronic musician around. The new album retains the sprawl of ‘Venice’, but the level of granular detail happening here is an awesome reminder of why this man is as vital as he is.
In a very similar vein, there will be a new Tim Hecker album out soon as well, called An Imaginary Country, if it’s anywhere near as good as the distorted bliss-out of ‘Harmony in Ultraviolet‘, then i’ll be the proverbial pig in shit.

Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog – Party Intellectuals

(Pi Recordings, 2008)

Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog (“not a ‘project’; a real band”, their myspace proclaims) occupies a strange place between a sort of vapid insouciance and blistering intensity, but i think this tension is a large part of what makes it work. Any contrived notion of cynical detachment is constantly being usurped by an inadvertent joie de vivre, or moments of intense poignancy. Tracks like ‘Todo El Mundo  Es Kitsch’ live up to their name, but on ‘Pinch’, a by-numbers disco romp gets annihilated by one of the most coruscating guitar solos i’ve heard about two minutes in. ‘Digital Handshake’ rides atop a squarewave synth bassline, collapses into close to three minutes of twiddly noise before it plows back into the original groove with emphatic vigour. The title track is, oddly enough, pretty much guitar free; instead a deranged synth groove and a zombie-like rallying cry of ‘PARTYPARTYPARTYPARTY’ makes it closer to a more demented Devo or Brainiac.

Interestingly, it is the more subdued tracks that actually hit harder; ‘When We Were Young And We Were Freaks’ skates on thin ice for a while, with a  token downcast riff and a stoned-sounding spoken-word drawl, but some incredible free drumming and noise guitar, and  an obstinate refusal to ever settle into any form of groove, makes it genuinely soul-crushing, and as unhinged as any of the heavier tracks.

‘Bateau’ has a somber grace to it as well, which is quite rudely punctuated by harsh metallic guitar tones towards the end. “ShShSh” adheres to a similar template, with a stunning guitar piece contending with field recordings that sound like some sort of phantom transmission.

I suppose that this inconsistency, and the apparent contradictions contained on an album like this, could be considered  a weakness, but it is precisely for this reason that i love this album.

When We Were young and We Were Freaks (extract)

Fred Frith – To Sail, To Sail

(Tzadik, 2008)

Fred Frith’s ‘To Sail, To Sail’ is a much more focused affair, dedicated to exploring the textural range of the acoustic guitar, and extending  that range through all manner of preparations. The economy of his means are truly staggering: bowed strings, constantly being tuned up and down, cause overtonal havoc on ‘Weather Gauge’, while the skitter of a crocodile clip against the strings in ‘First Light’ becomes a microrhythmic  centre for the piece. The astonishing ‘Dog Watch’ is grounded by a rhythmic scrape, which gets enveloped by drones (either from e-bowed strings or acoustic feedback, i can’t be too sure) which trace out mournful semi-melodies through downtuning, before the piece culminates in a relentless percussive attack. Elsewhere, a Fahey-ish minimalism, and the dulcimer-like attack of the prepared guitar makes for an album on which the ingenuity of its approach is matched only by it’s lyricism.

(I was not given permission to post extracts from this album but you can stream clips from it here)