The sounds of apocalypse #2 (but most of the time it’s beautiful)
By: Yaya | in: Indie |
James Blackshaw - The Cloud Of Unknowing (Tompkins Square, 2007)
Every now and then, there comes an album that makes you drop everything and find a different career as a shoemaker or whatever. That feeling of “at least when it comes down to shoelaces, I’m not compared to my colleagues” gets a reasonable and offending sense when you understands the music.
The understanding I’m talking about is not listening to Miles “Sketches Of Spain” and understand its roots.
I’m talking about the music that functions as a wire around a cork of a well shaken Champagne bottle, and it’s the only thing the keeps the volcanoes of creativity inside the bottle and prevents them from bursting out.
This creativity was well hidden all these years under the cover of the old “my art is not legit”, and the release of that cork makes the time of hesitation transform into the time of your creation. The one things that interferes with the true liberation, is the fact that it’s so good, that it castrates you, and you drop your guitar, puts John Fahey’s “Of Rivers And Religion” back on the shelve, and dive into the world of women’s shoes.
That was the feeling I got when I first heard James Blackshaw, 24 years old, when he released his first proper release (after a series of wonderful cd-r’s) O True Believers.
One year later, he released “The Cloud Of Unknowing” (In the wonderful Tompkins Square Records, a small but very quality label). He didn’t grow up in one year and became 25. He grew up in a light year (9,460,730,472,580.8 Km, to be precised) and became a classic.
Blackshaw took his own place in the modern folk impressive guitar player, joining the tea party of Jack Rose, Glenn Jones, Richard Bishop, Harris Newman and others, all of them forming a modern replica of the circle of giants assembling the cult Tacoma label in the 60’s and 70’s (Members of the circle were people like John Fahey, Max Ochs, Leo Kottke and Robbie Basho).
In the last couple of years the numbers of guitar players who just found out who Fahey was, increased to the point where it becomes dangerous. To the authenticity, that is. Everyone tuned their guitars to DADGAD, bought a thumb pick and start practicing on their Mississippi John Hurt grooves. I am that sort of person.
But Blackshaw is different from all of them, and with his new album, he’s different from himself. He brings something new to the music, and it’s a masterpiece.
Blackshaw enters the Robbie Basho niche in the circle, as a 12 strings guitar player, tuned with open tunings, while playing eastern,Celtic, and Arabic scales and modes.
In his previous albums, you can identify Blackshaw’s influences, both as a guitar player and a composer. But in Cloud, as someone who made the great leap (a light year ahead), we got a new, improved, mature and fascinating James. A James that pressed the paused button in the cd player, removed the needle from the vinyl, did put Basho’s Zarthus on the shelve (where did you get a copy, btw? I’ve been looking for one), and brought him. Only him. The great individual. And this individual, as I said, makes me wanna be a shoemaker or a fireman.
So much originality, beauty and vision in one record, that it merges into a fantasy story without its cliches. His guitar, dipped in a pleasant and accurate reverb (sounds a bit like it was taken from Windham Hill records) bangs on the Geneva office doors of the ECM A&R’s. It could have been one of their classics, if it wasn’t so psychedelically dark and mysterious.
Most of the album is a lone 12 strings guitar composition, but a sudden Glockenspiel arrives (played by Blackshaw on Running To The Ghosts, along with a guest violin). The guitar is put asides in Clouds Collapse which is a 4 minutes sounds structure produced by a high pitched string instrument, based on a far and dense distortion layer.
The album ends with a waltz tempo pastoral piece (Stained Glass Window), where Blackshaw gives his 10 minutes of breathtaking landscapes of Bolivian mountains, and completely turns the phase to the 5 minutes endings of the violinist Fran Bury that enters with a squeaking violin playing, addicted to an endless tape loop and brings the apocalypse.
The Cloud Of Unknowing, as it turns out to be, is a symbol of humanity that began with a pastoral Eden, got a tremendous shock in the middle, got back on tracks afterwards, and ended when a violinist decided to ruin everything.
The apocalypse, is a fine fine moment.
Btw - a new album by James is now out. And soon - A review !
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Posted on April 8, 2008
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