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

Never The Same Way Twice is a collection of previously unreleased archive recordings by The Memory Band, compiled to coincide with twenty years since the release of their first self-titled album. It features alternative takes, mixes and arrangements of their own contemporary brand of folk music chosen from across two decades of musical navigations.  
https://thememoryband.bandcamp.com/album/never-the-same-way-twice


The album begins with the earliest mix of Calling On from their very first EP, sung by producer Stephen Cracknell, Polly Paulusma and Adem Ilhan from post rock band Fridge. Long-time associate Nancy Wallace's voice features on three tracks on the album: a cover of Arthur Russell’s This is How We Walk On The Moon, the very first studio take of the traditional ballad I Wish I Wish from Apron Strings and The Memory Band’s version of what became their theme song, Time And Space. Hannah Caughlin leads the ensemble through a haunting cover version of Come Wander With Me (which first appeared as the theme for the final episode of The Twilight Zone), while fellow traveller Liam Bailey sings on Children Of The Crows, a corvid-inspired mix of Children Of The Stones from the album A Fair Field.  Jess Roberts delivers a soulful interpretation of the Talk Talk song I Don’t Believe In You with added recorders, while Olivia Chaney sings an ancient drinking song from the Weyhill Fair as the introduction to So Fleet Runs The Hart. Additional vocals on the album are provided by Simon Lord, Helene Bradley, Sam Genders, Findlay Brown and Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor, with spoken word contributions from John Andrews and Lisa Knapp.  The instrumentalists on the album include Jennymay Logan, Rob Spriggs, Tom Page, Fred Thomas, Liza Bec, Olie Brice, Alex Bonney, Jonny Bridgwood, Dee Byrne, Paul McGee, Rhys Morgan, Howard Cottle, Al Doyle, Quinta, Jeremy Radway, Lucy Railton, Sarah Scutt, Serafina Steer and Jon Thorne. 

Never The Same Way Twice is woven together in the trademark episodic Memory Band style with traditional tunes, original compositions and cover versions interspersed with spoken word, field recordings and sound effects in a collage of recordings drawn from different spaces and places, sounds continuously shaped and re-shaped by the ever-fluid ensemble of collaborators who have lent their own distinctive voices to the project over the years. The Memory Band was formed by Cracknell after a series of solo releases on The Leaf Label led to invitations in 2002 to play live at a festival supporting Coil and to produce a new live soundtrack to The Wicker Man film at the ICA. The music developed for those shows led to the recording of the band’s first vinyl 7 inch in 2003, followed by the debut album a year later, both self-released on the Hungry Hill label. These received positive reviews in the music press, who identified The Memory Band as pioneers of what was dubbed a ‘folk renaissance’. Aided by some early plays on independent radio, invitations to perform soon followed, with the band cementing their reputation at the burgeoning independent gig and festival scene that was developing across the country in the early 2000s. From the outset, spontaneity and spirit were prioritised over consistency and precision, and The Memory Band embraced a willingness to take on any opportunity that was presented to it. 

The response to that first album and those early shows led to six studio albums, a whole host of side projects, bespoke events and a magical two decades of musical adventures. The Balearic Folk Orchestra, The Accidental album There Were Wolves and a long association performing music for The Wicker Man as well as a number of other film and archive related projects are among the many branches of The Memory Band tree.

Never The Same Way Twice full album stream

W S Graham introduces and reads the poem 'Johann Joachim Quantz's Five Lessons' (from his 1977 collection 'Implements In Their Places'). Recorded and broadcast circa 1978. 