Richard Swift Presents  Dime, Nickel, Pennies

From the album, 'South Wind,Clear Sky,' out now on Second Language Music.  www.secondlanguagemusic.com

Perhaps still most widely recognised for Dreaming With Alice, his 1972 psych-folk debut for RCA Italy as a 19-year-old art student-troubadour, Mark Fry has been turning his creative gaze on the world, and alchemising its elements into shimmering, quietly visionary works of art, ever since. Certainly not an artist who dances to the music of time in any conventional sense, Mark, a respected, and collected, painter, most often to be found holed up in his Normandy farmhouse studio, allowed more than three decades to glide by before recording Alice’s follow up, 2008’s Shooting The Moon. His subsequent musical activity has been frenetic by comparison.

Mark’s beguiling, Arcadian-flavoured 2011 Second Language album, I Lived In Trees, recorded in collaboration with The A. Lords – musicians from a more recent generation of psychedelic-folk experimenters – proved a major critical hit, demonstrating that Mark Fry’s musical stock lay not only in the Paisley-hued haze of his Aquarian Age youth, but also in the full glare of the postmodern, internet-facilitated present. A series of concerts in Japan and Scandinavia, and a widely reported ‘supergroup’ London showcase, featuring members of Mercury Rev, Super Furry Animals, Tunng and Lemon Jelly, further evinced the subtle but inexorable diffusion of the Mark Fry legend, something abetted by BBC Radio 4’s Today programme airing an interview with Mark in the wake of Trees’ release.

All of which brings us to Mark Fry’s latest, most exquisitely realised musical offering to date, South Wind, Clear Sky. Sung with that now familiar alloy of cool restraint and wondering innocence, and passingly reminiscent of the kind of English pastoralism associated with the likes of Kevin Ayers or Bill Fay, the album’s leanly arranged yet immersive songs are propelled by Mark’s glinting, plangent guitars and deliciously embroidered by John Parker’s double bass, Angèle David-Guillou’s piano and backing vocals and Katie Lang’s French horn, all bound together by producer Guy Fixsen (My Bloody Valentine, Stereolab) into a delightfully iridescent whole. For all its finely honed arrangements, and the translucence of its recording, South Wind, Clear Sky is still very much the work of the man who made Dreaming With Alice; the mature Mark Fry’s feeling for wonderment and magic, for the dreamlike and the innocently surreal, is just as pervasive, and persuasive here, only more focused, and etched against a more luminous, even heavenly canvas.

Where the lyrics on his last album found Mark reaching up through the summer branches toward an azure sky, here that celestial dimension provides the focus for eight shimmering chamber-folk essays whose wistful narratives of flight and fancy and empyrean romance purr and soar with a stately grace, like the ‘Aeroplanes’ of the album’s richly melodic opening track.


Mark Fry - Aeroplanes

Artist: DEMIAN CASTELLANOS
Album: The Kyvu Tapes Vol.I (1990-1998)

HITD 025
Limited edition of 350 copies on black vinyl 

Label, orders: www.handsinthedarkrecords.com
Co-release with Cardinal Fuzz

DEMIAN CASTELLANOS - Lizard Raga

From the album Modern Country, out now on Merge Records.

Modern Country

William Tyler "Gone Clear"

Full context and poem text: https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/04/27/janna-levin-reads-planetarium-by-adrienne-rich/

Recorded at "The Universe in Verse," April 24, 2017.

Photograph of Janna Levin by Molly Walsh / Academy of American Poets

POEM TEXT / CONTEXT

Astrophysicist Janna Levin reads "Planetarium" by Adrienne Rich

Centrafrique (Musique Gbaya - chants à penser)-  Daite(excerpt)

Poem text and context: https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/10/23/the-weighing-jane-hirshfield/

Recorded at @pioneerworks, October 29, 2018.

Astrophysicist Janna Levin Reads "The Weighing" by Jane Hirshfield

The All Is One

The Same Old Rock (One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy)

Poem text and context: https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/12/31/new-years-eve-rebecca-elson/

"Futura Vecchia, New Year's Eve" by Rebecca Elson (read by Maria Popova)

No-No Boy '1975' out on April 2nd, 2021, available now for pre-order. 

No-No Boy is the musical project of Vietnamese American singer and scholar Julian Saporiti. On his Smithsonian Folkways debut 1975, named after the year Saigon fell, Saporiti investigates his own family heritage as well as life in WWII Japanese internment camps, immigrant detention centers and refugee camps in 2020, and other stories of immigration that illustrate the complexities of becoming American. His songs are the epitome of folk storytelling in the modern era, as he interweaves histories with field recordings from the sites of collective trauma and fragments of Asian American musical tradition, from jazz to rock, to choral musicir). With his plaintive, direct voice, he takes listeners on a deeply human journey through the Asian American experience in the US.

Puente Sonoros

No-No Boy - The Best God Damn Band in Wyoming

Liam Mour - Dreaming Of A Better Place

Composed, Produced, Mixed by Liam Mour
Mastered by Zino Mikorey

© ℗ 2021 Ode To Youth

www.odetoyouth.net
www.odetoyouth.bandcamp.com
www.instagram.com/liammour_

contact: info@odetoyouth.net

Astrophysicist Janna Levin reads "Planetarium" by Adrienne Rich

brainpicker