Chris Forsyth: Dreams

I bought this at a recent live show, and though it comes from a tour pressing of just 100 LPs I felt inclined to get on here on the off chance that someone with similar ears is listening… I believe a few copies are still available from here and here.

It’s a stunning guitar record, skimming low over acres of unpopulated, unfarmed, undulating lands. At times it reaches seriously giddy heights, truthfully it rarely comes down, just swoops you low over your coffin from time to time, then double backs to the present. If you can find a copy I’d recommend it as highly as it has placed me, legs a-swingin from the bough of the only cherry tree on the peak of Mount Kailash.

The first track is the song that Forsyth opened with when I saw him live (review here), it shudders out under the nameplate of ‘Soft History’. Although it is played on acoustic twelve string for the recorded performance, it lacks none of the backbone that emanated from the Stratocaster on the night. Round, lute-like pluckings sooth whilst dust-devil horns create awe inspiring phantoms. It is not only this element which recalls Human Bell (the crushing delayed trumpet on ‘Ephaphatha’), the oscillating guitar picking shows similar persistence but takes a step further away from the blues with minute changes in scale and pattern in place of additions of weight. It collapses, then emerges as if a mirror image itself, sounding suddenly, irresistibly narcotic.

The second track, ‘String Haters’ builds upon an electric shivering, a death-rush anxiety, through twelve minutes or so to become the most scathing, satisfying swirl of feedback and fuzz I have heard all year. ‘Long Afternoon’, the shortest of the four at about six minutes, is another outing on the twelve string. Forsyth is adept at introducing wholly natural elements in a wholly unnatural way.

Following a brief pastoral passage of strong picking a heavily down-strummed flourish took me aback with its rich, open tuned beauty. Before I had time to absorb the visions it induces, the electric guitar breaks from it’s hypnotic, low end west-coast chiming to aggressively escalate; rearing up like a serpent that had ample time to bite but didn’t, before dissipating instantly. In that wake comes a slow build; a transmogrification of tension to joyous ease, a ‘Long Afternoon’ I can relate with. A video for the song is posted below, via the label Evolving Ear, though it proves how much power and emotion the vinyl imbues the music with when you listen to Internet Audio directly afterwards...

The final piece is a fourteen minute slow jam for Jupiter’s binocular moons; the careening feedback guitar work seems beautifully choreographed as it howls in its brute voice to the dream that floats over the placid lake of chiming electric guitars and rippling synth, which itself hovers like a moment from a Philip Glass symphony frozen in time. Or does it remind me of Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way? Either way I guess… The spoken word samples that usher it in abide vividly in my memory throughout the listen.

Last night I swam in the estuary of the Helford River after the sun had set. It takes me a while, I inch my way in, building my resistance to the cold, numbing myself piece by piece. But eventually I swam, stars and phosphorescence both appeared which seemed strange for mid October. At times I laughed out loud, a slightly overweight twenty five year old pirouetting under a passing satellite, a man impersonating a monkey and getting cramp in his toes. This record just drove all that deeper inside me, picking it’s way through last nights dreams to carry the joy on over to today.

* Mount Kailash: “There have been no recorded attempts to climb Mount Kailash; it is considered off limits to climbers in deference to Buddhist and Hindu beliefs. It is the most significant peak in the world that has not seen any known climbing attempts.”