Customer Reviews

City of Refuge

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The first thing that struck me when I first held this in my hand was the reawakening
of the name Blind Joe Death in the text on the backside of the cover!...I wondered why...
Then upon first hearing I was a little bit reluctant about this whole album...
In fact it took some time before I had readjusted my mental processes from a stadium of
passive hearing into a stadium of active listening...then things really started to happen!
I was struck by a weird association to a short story by Robert Silverberg that I read
so many years ago...in short as follows: Some scientists succeed,by means of science
fictional wizardry,in resurrection of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, the young dead Italian
Barocque Composer known almost exclusively for his fantastic piece of music Stabat Mater.
He is then taken into the 20th century and supplied with first class musicians and top quality
instruments and all the parafernalia one could ever imagine...in order to write more fantastic
Barocque music...and suddenly he is disappeared...and refound in the cellar rock and punk clubs!
...and his statement is that he does not want to write music for the museums but for the living
people! (I have a strong feeling that at least Glenn Jones will recognize some of this...!)
This record came after 5 years of silence and some will call it "a step in a new direction" but I
will call it a logical conclusion of what has been before!
Musically it opens up with Fanfare which is a piece where an electronic drone is established and
upon this is interwoven a collage of music,sounds and voices, somewhat in the style of The Singing
Bridge 30 years earlier. With the arrival of a steam engine train blowing and puffing away this leads
directly over to a heavily amplified electric guitar playing blues motifes and riffs. Then leading
directly to The Mill Pond with bottleneck technique explorations of the higher register on the guitar
set against the electronic drone.
Chelsea Silver Please Come Home is an acoustic reworking of themes by Frank Hutchison and Bukka White
set against a defragmentarized double thumb bass, which sometimes becomes a syncopated quadruple thumb
bass where You can hear pieces of Worried Blues and Poor Boy Long Ways From Home.
City Of Refuge I is a 20 minutes long piece opening up with Fahey exploring various sounds, sonorities,
chord progressions, hammer ons, roll offs etcetera in order to establish an order out of chaos which
eventually leads into a rendition of Juana with some weird citations of motifes originally found in Dance
Of Death a lifetime earlier. I find in this one a strong link back to America (the LP) and Fare Forwards
Voyagers...
City Of Refuge III (Whatever happened to II?)finds Fahey playing a set of variations on Skip James themes,
mainly from Hard Times Killing Floor Blues, straight ahead with no confusions.
Hope Slumbers Eternally is a recombination of themes from The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party (and I
can also hear something from Wine and Roses/Red Pony) carefully laid out against that earlier mentioned electronic drone.
The ending piece is a again 20 minutes long piece which continues on Fanfare as a collage of sounds, music,
voices etcetera and where You can hear small pieces of music almost at the border of what really is aurally perceptible...dreamlike if You wish...I even thought I heard a bit of a Blind Willie Johnson guitar somewhere
at a faint distance.
The final half of the piece consists of a loop of "white electronic noise" with a "hissing sound" that is
repeated over and over and over until it reaches an almost hypnotical effect and I begin hearing music, that objectively absolutley is not there... It all ends abruptly with that steam engine train puffing and blowing
away again...
That's it Folks!
To me this is nothing but a logical conclusion of what has been before, with the only difference that Fahey
here takes in use new electronic studio techniques that were not available in the 60s.
But otherwise it is basically the same Fahey, although matured and refined...
So finally...Now I can perfectly understand why the name Blind Joe Death was reawakened for this
record...because this is only but another chapter in the BJD-saga.
Fahey has here created nothing but an artistic Masterpiece...not in the same cathegory as Yellow Princess and Transfigurations perhaps...but still a Masterpiece!

For certain it has little to do soundwise w/ Fahey's more traditional guitar stylings, but plenty of assocation and reference to his earlier experiments in musique concrete. Sounds like some weird cross between Derek Bailey and John Cage maybe. I especially enjoy the opening overture, which sounds like Fahey jamming with an old noisy refrigerator motor. This CD is grating at times but I've got a lot of respect for Fahey for announcing his 'comeback' with such a thoroughly uncompromising disc of new material.

If you don't think that there are great songs on this with some great guitar playing then you obviously didn't listen to cuts like Chelsey Silver, Please Come Home or City Of Refuge III. But what sets this album apart is his courage to experiment which most people of his age are usually afraid to do. They usually want to give something to people that they can immediately understand, that they don't have to think too much about. Well, to Fahey, it's all about art, just like it's always been to him. Yeah, there are moments of noisy self-indulgence, but if you really listen, it's all just emotion. That's really all he's ever done, just played his emotions.

Whatever this is it is absolutely unlistenable. I can't give it away. I have some of Fahey's earlier work which is fabulous. I lost touch with his work and actually kind of forgot about him. Then I heard the stories of his illness and his mental breakdown. Well evidentally it's all true if this is any indication. The liner notes are but a small peek into what it must be like to be Fahey as he rants on about being missunderstood. Is it any wonder? Instead of buying this may I suggest you slam your head in a car door about seven times. You'll enjoy it much more than you would listening to seven seconds of this.