Monday 21 August 2017

Kris Dollimore's Requiem To Two Johns



This is Kris Dollimore playing a song John Fahey wrote when Mississippi John Hurt died in 1966.

Immediately there's a sense of fearful automation to the piece that sounds like Death got bored of the scythe and now chases people with a combine harvester. Part of the dread in there is something I sense in lot of Fahey's music- a mixture of stuffy front porch, heatwaves on cracked clay and vultures wheeling, and it comes from that resonance that flows in and out of your focus sounding either indispensable or unbearable. Something feeling either extremely regular or very wrong in the body.

Following the initial sense of being hunted there is a cascade of notes in the next section that reminds me of a couple of things- one is the idea of the recapitulation of life at the moment of death*, the other is an intense expression of gratitude. Something around hunting or homage or the parallel between the two.

A chain of hunters from Hurt to Fahey to Dollimore, who plays it so fucking beautifully.

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