John Fahey - Disc of the day

John Fahey
The New Possibility…/Christmas with John Fahey Vol. II

(Takoma, 1993)

Magus of acoustic twangling gets his Rudolf on. Xmas magic ensues.

Many is the time I’ve sat with the headphones on in a dark corner of the house trying to figure out what the hell John Fahey was chasing after. No-one seems to agree. This beautiful collection of the American steel-string guitarist’s festive efforts, from 1968 and 1975, possesses a deliciously deep and spooky ambience, a disjointed jauntiness coupled with a frost-fall morning melancholy, Fahey’s guitar somehow sounding like an Elizabethan harpsichord grown wild and mad out in the Appalachian mountains. But what do I know? Our otherwise on-the-money Fahey How To Buy [MOJO 164] dismisses these recordings as “Cliff-territory bland”. Perhaps, if you want your mercurial blues folk guitarists to just deliver extended syncopated tone poems and epic psychedelic ragas, then you’re right to stay away from Fahey’s Xmas efforts, but if you want a guitar album that somehow sounds exactly like Christmas morning – clear, sharp, and cold on the outside but with a crackling fireside warmth at its heart – then this is the perfect stocking-filler.

Andrew Male

Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 20/12/2007