Release Date: 11 November 2013
Label: Second Language
Packaging Type: Slip Sleeve (CD or Vinyl)
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 885767980662
Description
Second Language label's first vinyl release - in collaboration with renowned psych/prog/acid-folk specialist label, Golden Pavilion. Ltd edition (500 copies only) 180gm vinyl album with sleeve designed by Iker Spozio (Colleen, Delia Derbyshire, etc).
Mark Fry is best known for his 1972 psych-folk classic Dreaming With Alice, a record that became a noughties underground cause célèbre thanks to name-checks by the likes of Jim O Rourke and Fourtet s Kieran Hebden. Long settled in Normandy and enjoying a successful career as a painter, interest in his musical juvenilia came as a great surprise to Mark, who nonetheless relished the renewed attention enough to start recording again a guitar having always been propped up against his painting studio wall.
A getting-back-on-the-horse new album, Shooting the Moon, duly appeared in 2008, after which Fry was courted by two young Dorset idyll-summoners: Mike Tanner (a.k.a. Plinth and a member of United Bible Studies, among myriad other arcane, leftfield outlets) and Nick Palmer (who records as Directorsound). The multi-instrumentalist pair, having christened themselves The A. Lords, quickly set about furnishing Mark with some timelessly hazy, art-folk musical backings over which the thoroughly rejuvenated singer-songwriter could unfurl his dream-like lyrics and gorgeously meandering vocal melodies. The result is I Lived in Trees: a gloriously drowsy, bucolic folk vision, pulled into Technicolor focus by Lemon Jelly s Nick Franglen at the mixing desk, and etched with The A. Lords classical guitars, Mellotrons and deft chamber arrangements all of it in service of Mark Fry s magically timeless lyrical reveries.
It is, effectively, Dreaming With Alice s true follow-up, a mere 39 years down the track.
Tracklisting
Mark Fry
Piano Magic
Mark Fry / The A.Lords
Oliver Cherer
Piano Magic
Memory Drawings
Colleen
The Smiths
KEG
The Rulers of the Root
Pearl Charles
The Amazons
Blue Violet
Searows
Esme Emerson
