Disc of the day
Bo Diddley - Bo Diddley
Magnificent late-'50s singles round-up that keeps on giving.
Features Disc of the day
P.G. Six
The Well Of Memory
(Amish, 2004)
Folk ghostliness arises from the no man's land between insanity and normality.
Recently rewatching Werner Herzog's 1974 film, the Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser I came to the realisation that the short, vague life of poor Kaspar is similar to that of many of our non-mainstream recording artists. After a hermetic life of cellar dwelling, devoid of all human contact, Kaspar emerges into the outside world, a toby jug brimming with savant strangeness, the subject of intense wonder and curiosity. Unfortunately, contact with rank humanity inevitably transforms him, to such a degree that his newly educated presence brings about a powerful anger in the masses and he gets stabbed and hit on the head a lot, before dying of liver failure. Surely we all have a minor recording artist we have treated in such a fashion, revelling in their preternatural, unheimlich manoeuvres but getting all affronted and angry when they embrace the sophisticated trappings of, you know, normal society. Mine is New York singer-songwriter Pat Gubler who, as P.G. Six, first appeared in 2001, as if from Northern Appalachian barrens, a thorn-scratched disoriented Thoreau blending exquisite innocent-abroad vocal delivery with near-perfect Jansch picking, Eno-esque hum and guitar feedback. His album debut, Parlor Tricks And Porch Favourites possessed a profound fog-on-the-headland unease, the songs of a young man heading out into the mystic with all the fear, trepidation and fortitude of the gentleman traveller in a Victorian ghost story.
From the tenor banjo picking and double-tracked boy/girl whisper on Come In ("Arise arise... love, the guest, is come today"), to the lonesome guitar and Korg Polysix stream that babbles underneath Crooked Way ("I drove down some crooked way / Roads not so clear"), The Well Of Memory, took the PG Six template even further, bringing in prepared wind harp, ukelin, Prophet 600 and tin whistle, placing the listener in a dark, hallucinatory wasteland between the familiar and the uncanny, the customary folk landscape imbued with a sense of terror and exhilaration, the manic desolation of a man wrestling with his own dark soul. Yet, 2007's Slightly Sorry found Gubler swapping the pastoral dread and mesmeric Gordian knots of melody and meaning for, well, an album that sounded a bit like a third-rate Bonnie Prince Billy's country rock jam. Here was an evidently sane, happy man making strum-happy music with a modern, bright production. He was cured. I hated it. I wanted to hit him on the head. Now I feel a bit bad. But, after watching Kaspar Hauser, there remains a part of me that wants to lock Pat Gubler up in his metaphorical wood cellar and not let him out until he's unwell, ready to make more beguiling, unfathomable albums like this.
Andrew Male
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 14/07/2009
Further Listening
P.G. Six - Parlor Tricks And Porch Favorites (Amish, 2001)
Joshua Burkett - Gold Cosmos (Feathered One's Nest, 2002)
Six Organs Of Admittance - Dark Noontide (Holy Mountain, 2002)
Previous Disc of the day
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Bo Diddley - Bo Diddley
Magnificent late-'50s singles round-up that keeps on giving.
6:00 AM GMT 20/11/2009
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Isley Brothers - The Brothers: Isley
The Cincinnati siblings bed into their heavy period.
6:00 AM GMT 18/11/2009
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Lee Morgan - Search For The New Land
The trumpeter's most soulful excursion entrances MOJO messageboarder.
6:00 AM GMT 16/11/2009
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