John Fahey – Proofs and Refutations (2023)    


Review:
Well now, anybody expecting the familiar genre-defining acoustic guitar picking found on John Fahey’s most well-known works – from Blind Joe Death to America, take your pick – will be somewhat bamboozled by Proofs and Refutations, an idiosyncratic yet ace curve ball of a recording, combining vocal manipulation with a more improvised approach to guitar playing. Put together between 1995 and 1996 in his room in Salem, Oregon, Proofs is an experimental set of songs (sometimes heavy on the mental, hello For LMC 2), closer in tone to his forays into noise music and later albums like Red Cross and Womblife than his earlier works. There is a nod to Red Cross in Untitled (w/o Rain), apparently a companion piece to that album’s Untitled with Rain, itself a spacious organ piece with sparsely peppered guitar lines. Untitled (w/o Rain) is built from reverb-heavy, eerie and scattered slide guitar shards that blend at the halfway mark with a freaky, fuzzy howl, creating a fever dream of a song. The voice is quite the instrument on parts of this set, a warped and sonically tweaked tool that kicks in straight away on All the Rains, a collage of layered vocals that feels like a crazed mix of Disney’s Father Noah’s Ark song from 1933 and Bill Orcutt’s Cracked Shit. Oh yes. F For Fake brings in down-tuned acoustic lap steel, reminiscent of Railroad I, then adds a low chant that is both Basho-esque and akin to experimental vocal improvisers. It really is quite rewarding and bewitching music, if you’re up for being challenged and perhaps even slightly alarmed by what you hear. That said, elsewhere, the tunes can be quite mischievous, like on the solo acoustic Morning (Pt. 1), a stuttering, furtive piece with hints of warmth and beauty, subtly different to its sister song, the more serious and adult Morning (Pt. 2). In a similar vein is the other two-parter, Evening, Not Night one and two, both solo acoustic pieces but with a more sturdy, blues-based rhythm running through them. These are quietly mesmerising songs, with the second slowly and steadily bringing things to a halt with stuttering, stop-start guitar lines and quietly accomplished snippets of playing. For those who know less about Fahey’s later catalogue and more experimental approach to music, Proofs and Refutations is a great starting point, with its juxtaposing of elegant acoustic picking, crazed vocals in places and distorted guitar. For the rest of you, just enjoy this wonderfully rich and idiosyncratic set. — by Glenn Kimpton / folkradio.co.uk


   


Track List:
01 - All the Rains
02 - F for Fake
03 - Morning (Pt. 1)
04 - Morning (Pt. 2)
05 - For LMC 2
06 - Evening, Not Night (Pt. 1)
07 - Evening, Not Night (Pt. 2)
08 - Untitled (w/o Rain)


Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk, experimental
Country: Salem, Oregon, USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


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