it is rare to find meaty pieces of writing on Fahey that look at the composition of his pieces, writers often seem to be dazzled by his status & mythology, but I love good appreciations and analysis about the music itself. this guy seems to be offering a sort of General Theory of Fahey in that paragraph you quoted from, which is an endeavour that's familiar to me and pleasingly ambitious. It was a little unclear and I was starting to write about where I disagreed with it when I started to think about what he was getting at."The long standing difficulty in understanding Fahey’s musical proximity draws from the way he ordered meaning."
Fahey's musical proximity = who to think of him in the company of & how that might affect our understanding. This guy wants to compare Fahey to composers, suggesting that Fahey succeeds where many before have failed in trying to disrupt (even inverse) or change the 'primary musical context' or 'dominant form' through undermining "the way the components of a piece interact through degrees of importance" "in a way that unraveled the structural integrity of each element".
'Meaning' isn't fleshed out, but surely the meaning /is/ or /is in/ the ordering. What makes a given passage of notes more or less significant is how it is presented. I would say one thing that marks Fahey out from the composers listed is that he is very much a performer (crucially there is no clear distinction between performer/composer for fahey), and as a performer is able to have a much stronger effect on how things are presented. this seems analagous to how much Fahey loved intros, how he would play old songs with longer and longer intros over time, until the original song was just like a coda. like a drawn out alap in a raga, a lot of fahey's pieces are in no hurry to get where they're going, and he luxuriates in approaching from various oblique angles.
I would say one of the things Fahey had the most fun playing with was this sense of musical proximity (with... varying degrees of subtlety). Fahey appreciated some of the peculiar possibilities afforded by the sound world of the guitar. he understood the raw power of fingerstyle steel string playing from an acoustic perspective (& owned that to the extent that his name is the first ppl reach for to describe it), but he also had a beautiful understanding of the ways in which a lot of music was idiomatic to the guitar, and the flattening effect solo instrumental music has on different stylistic idioms. fahey can quote anyone and sound like himself. as a side note it occurs to me that this is close to the definition of freedom according to Hegel - being oneself in an other - & there is something supremely liberating and free about the way Fahey roamed stylistically, to an extent that no one else I've heard has really matched, and in strange/intuitive ways that could involve sudden sharp turns through time and space and genre. that is to say, he was a master of hodology. the clue is in the titles "stomping tonight on the pennsylvania/alabama border"; the inhabitants of the palace of king philip xiv of spain are rehoused in the invisible city of bladensburg. it's one thing to deploy a bit of skip james immediately after vaughan williams, another to play it so smoothly that it sounds fluid, and another again so that no one even notices that's what you're doing, it just sounds like you. the sound world of the guitar is the key: it elides geography and history, it can disguise, it's a third point through which emotional heft/meaning can be triangulated, it gives the distance necessary for irony, & Fahey appreciated the huge opportunities it opens up for a performer.
anyway I agree with him that death chants is one of the best records. I was listening to it while walking through spain earlier this month, and there is something about its slightly sun-faded classicism which suits the country (Fahey took such obvious care over his titles it seems odd ppl don't pay more attention to them). the original recordings have a comfortably-worn understated quality to the playing, and I think the album flows and hangs together the best of any of his early takoma efforts. I was listening to some summer day, just thinking about how amazing it would be to hear one of the current crop of guitarists release anything like that, but no one's even trying. 'post-fahey' is a misnomer, most of the stuff in that thread would be better thought of as post-rose who himself had a more complicated relationship to fahey than can be defined simply as 'post'. no one ever calls fahey 'post-james' or whatever, but he did at least understand how the music worked and was constructed and used that knowledge to do something else. I wld say Fahey has been most grievously misunderstood by guitarists, who have echoed him in strange superficial ways and kicked up a lot of dust that has clouded a sense of what he was up to.
I disagree about fare forward voyagers, and I think it's interesting to think why its so focused on with its grandiose eliot titles, dark, slightly foreboding cover signalling an indian influence, and Fahey doing his best to lend the pieces gravitas however he can. it's so hefty and serious compared to old fashioned love, which is the following album, and lacks all those signifiers and yet seems more convincing/honest to me in the cheerful way it moves through its hodge-podge of lighter styles (which is no less or more absurd than what he's up to on FFV) and then moves up into that suddenly painful, elevated mode with dry bones which seems like the most breathtaking ending to any fahey album to me (better than but somewhat similar to the way america ends with "the waltz that carried us away..."). mb FFV is the sort of trojan horse that guy is talking about; all this alluring exoticism, poetry and mysticism which fahey has used to get generations of black metal and experimental fans to listen to him doing a 23 minute cover of goodbye old paint.
there are some live versions of FFV in which Fahey's playing is more ferocious and immediate but in terms of his long extended medleys I definitely prefer god time & causality. fahey could be funereal in some ways but I think that's an example of how it's sometimes championed to the neglect of some of his best material.
Outstanding post. Makes me wonder if there has ever been any writing on Fahey that analyzes the music and identifies which pieces are included in what. Feel like jazz guys get this kind of musicological treatment all the time – this solo quotes from this piece, this introduction is particularly long compared to the studio recording, etc. By contrast, the books I've read on Fahey to date are a bit of a slog.
― Naive Teen Idol, Tuesday, 18 July 2017 02:44 (six years ago) link