The two latest reissues to spin off from our acclaimed Imaginational Anthem Volume 8: The Private Press feature the solo guitar compositions of Russell Potter, recorded in the last waning days of the initial American Primitive explosion.

A then obsessed teenaged devotee of John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Leo Kottke at a time when Punk and New Wave were ascendant, Potter harnessed a similar DIY ethos to his own ends by starting his own label & self-publishing his first record, 'A Stone's Throw', while a freshman enrolled at Goddard College in Vermont in 1979. Assembled at the legendary Boddie Records in Potter's hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, and sprinkled liberally with references to his heroes, from the initial record label name of Fonytone (which more than a little recalls Fahey's earliest record label, Fonotone), to the arcane song titles and references to obscure rags.

Even as he looks to his elders, Potter's debut release nimbly evinces a complete mastery of his form and is all the more remarkable for one of such tender years, as only the chutzpah of youth can account for such moves as successfully grafting one of your own composition to one of John Fahey's, as he does here. There's a very immediate, lovely, and real homespun quality to Potter's chiming twelve-string compositions that puts it in the realm of those classic records that seem to simply exist outside of time.

Shortly after 'A Stones Throw', Potter produced & released a 45rpm single by an Ohio bluegrass band featuring the cult singer songwriter Bob Frank performing a cover of Devo's 'Mongoloid', before moving on to his second (and sadly final) album the following year, 'Neither Here Nor There'. Following an independent study with a Goddard College ethnomusicologist, Potter's compositions and performance only deepened on his second release - the recording quality steps up a little but loses none of the immediacy, the playing gets more exuberantly virtuosic -but then more reflective too, particularly on the tunes that are influenced by the gorgeous traditional Irish slow airs. He's still tipping his hat to Fahey occasionally as well, this time with an audacious electric guitar setting of the classic "Dance of the Inhabitant of the Palace of King Philip XIV of Spain."

Though these albums landed at a time when American Primitive guitar music's 1960s & 1970s heyday was in the rear view mirror, they absolutely look ahead to the genre's eventual 21st Century resurrection, anticipating both in form & content many of the same concerns you find in the great contemporary work of the last two decades by Jack Rose, Glenn Jones, Daniel Bachman, et al., and as such provide about as fine a stepping stone between these two eras as you're likely to find.

Neither Here Nor There

Eirigh Suas A Stoirin

Coyote Canyon is a wilderness area behind my daughter's house where coyotes gather and howl before taking off for their nightly foraging. Little Tujunga (pronounced "Tuhunga") is a river running through the Angeles Forest near a house I lived in five decades ago. Half my ideas for this piece came from onshore guitar ruminating. The rest was improvised in studio. Emma was my close and sweet companion during this period, a lifelong deep friend. I composed her song one evening at the kitchen table of our place while she was cooking. Tumbleweedin' describes a desert tumbleweed storm. I menaced every inch of the Yamaha, recreating the effect of these windblown monsters screeching along boulders, smacking into cactus and anything else in their way at often impossible speeds, following the whims of the heavy winds. This song was completely improvised at the moment in studio and forgotten. Roy's Rain is a tribute to my great good friend and musician killed in a car accident in 1973. I found For Marsha Version 2 on a well-worn studio tape. It's a variant of the same composition on the Gentle Wilderness album. I like this loose and flowy version. Movin' On has one thing on its mind - getting away fast and now. Going Home is my improvised take on an American root song. The above seven were recorded between 1972-1975. Three Sisters was recorded on a 20-minute studio break in 1999 describing three barren red hills somewhere in the Arizona desert, a cherished location.

The latest in a series of reissues spawned from Imaginational Anthem Volume 8 : The Private Press, following Conklin/Blum - Jackdaw, Tom Armstrong - The Sky Is An Empty Eye, and Rick Deitrick - Gentle Wilderness and River Sun River Moon, Russell Potter - A Stoneâ€™s Throw and Neither Here Nor There.

Coyote Canyon

Emma by Rick Deitrick

Light Reality

Jo Thomas 
Poly plastic
PolyPlastic from A Sketch of Nature, Composer Jo Thomas Violinist Simmy Singh
 Ty Cerdd 2021

PolyPlastic from A Sketch of Nature, Composer Jo Thomas Violinist Simmy Singh

I Will Cross Any Bridge

Weniger Ist Mehr

naviarhaiku480:
filling my shadows
glorious rays bringing growth
heavenly ascent

haiku: Jennifer Doty https://twitter.com/jenncord
image: Elton Sa https://unsplash.com/@bigeruta
for the Naviar Records Haiku Music Challenge www.naviarrecords.com/about/naviar-haiku/

Glorious Rays [NaviarHaiku480]

Muti tracked guitar experiment - sounds better with headphones honest!

Freebird

Diffraction

Outandout (doodle)

No, Never

Rie Nakajima is a Japanese artist based in the UK. She has exhibited and performed all over the world charming audiences with her inventive works of mechanical bricolage. In 2014 she received the Arts Foundation prize for Experimental Music. She co-curates the event series ’ ‘Sculpture‘ with David Toop and has collaborated with Miki Yui, David Cunningham, Phill Niblock, Pierre Berthet and many others.

Four Forms is the first audio-document of Nakajima’s work, comprising four pieces recorded in Oxford in January 2014:

"sources of sound that have the lives of small creatures, maybe small creatures that hibernate in darkness but then come to life when exposed to the light. These creatures of which I speak are activated to perform their own cycles of drumming or scraping, all working together as if moving inexorably toward the sudden miraculous synchronicity of flashing light that a few fortunate observers have seen in firefly displays. What I am saying, should it be unclear, is that this is a kind of intensely rhythmic music performed by an extra-human ensemble not susceptible to the orthodoxies of human culture, in a sense a step into another dimension."

- David Toop

Diffraction

The Sunflower Band

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