The Mill Pond

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Originally released as a limited-edition vinyl-only double EP on the tiny Little Brother label in 1997, The Mill Pond is one of John Fahey's rarest later releases, little heard until this 2008 CD reissue. These four tracks, recorded in the Oregon hotel room in which Fahey was living at the time, are an eclectic and not always satisfying mix. The spectral opening track, "Ghosts," features Fahey moaning and wailing over his frail, disjointed acoustic guitar strums, sounding at first like one of the haunted house spirits from an old episode of Scooby-Doo. In the piece's final minutes, however, Fahey suddenly begins throat singing in the manner of the Tuvan tribesmen who were then first gaining prominence in world music circles. Throat singing, or overtone singing, in which the singer manages to sing two different pitches at the same time, is harsh and unlovely at first listen, but the drone effects quickly become hypnotic when performed by a master of the style such as the female Tuvan singer Sainkho Namtchylak. As an amateur throat singer at best, however, Fahey's version of the technique is more enthusiastic than technically adept, and to be honest, he mostly sounds as if he might be going through the DTs. Track two, "Garbage," must have been even more unsettling to the aging folkies and proto-new agers who had discovered Fahey through his haunting acoustic records of the '60s: producer Jeff Allman processes Fahey's voice and guitar lines through so many effects that they're no longer distinguishable as anything other than oscillating waves of feedback and noise, ebbing and flowing for several initially intriguing but ultimately tiresome minutes. Unlike Loren MazzaCane Connors or Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, to name some of Fahey's more avant-garde disciples, Allman lacks the aesthetic gifts to shape his over-processed sounds into a coherent whole. The third track, "You Can't Cool Off in the Mill Pond, You Can Only Die," more effectively conflates the approaches of the first two, with Fahey's wordless howls and moans and detuned acoustic guitar lunges laid atop a bed of electric feedback and drones. The even better "The Mill Pond Drowns Hope" is the most typically Fahey-like track here, a spiky fingerpicked blues with slide that's augmented and not obliterated by Fahey's throat singing and Allman's noise-drone tweaking. It's a satisfying end to a frustratingly inconsistent minor work that's primarily of interest to hardcore John Fahey fans and students of the 1990s noise rock underground. This reissue includes a booklet of reproductions of Fahey's paintings, collected together for the first time. ~ Stewart Mason, All Music Guide

Artist	John Fahey
Format	CD
Genre	Folk
Label Name	Important
Release Date	2008 03 25
Song List	1: Ghosts (5:47) 2: Garbage (10:40) 3: You Can't Cool Off in the Mill Pond, You Can Only Die (3:37) 4: The Mill Pond Drowns Hope (7:05)
Style.Categories	Finger-Picked Guitar, Noise-Rock

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