A few more serious reflective thoughts should be forthcoming in the next day or so, for now I would like to leave you with this: Chet Atkins and his pickin hand, there is something quite humbling about it. Here's to an amazing new year.
I would never claim to be a metal expert but every once in a while I stumble upon artists like Dwarr. In my mind, Duane Warr (DWARR was his recording moniker) is to metal what Bob Desper and Bill Clint are to folk. Downer, loner, outsider, doom, whatever appellation you want to tag on to the music. There is something unsettling, singular, and very memorable about DWARR's handful of recordings from the early and mid eighties. Duane Warr lived in Columbia, South Carolina and recorded two albums, "Starting Over" and "Animals" largely by himself. "Starting Over" was self-released in 1984, "Animals" came some time later, and now the records are supremely rare finds, fetching hundreds of dollars. The music is menacing like Sabbath but with a fragile edge (which I guess Sabbath always had as well) that belies the "outsider/DIY" quality of it. The muddy production and washed out chorus effects only add to the bizarre meta-warp of Warr's records; whether this was intentional or not, as with all so called "real people" albums, is up to debate. Apparently Warr became a born again Christian and destroyed most of the remaining copies of his records, along with the master tapes, thus sealing his music in the impossible canon that keeps dorks like me crate digging all the time. This is pretty desolate stuff though, and if I didn't know that Warr had gone on to a rather benign post metal existence, I think his music would be even that much more surreal. The video below was made by Warr and his brother, presumably in the mid eighties. The track is off of his first record, "Starting Over". I would love to find more tracks off this particular album; while "Animals" has a more cohesive hard psych/buzzsaw drone and plod, "Starting Over" is barely what you could call a proper metal record, with this kind of eerie twilight fatigue to it.
This summer I read a very moving history of the Romani people called "Bury Me Standing". While even casual music fans are aware of the "Gypsy" influence on Western music, from Flamenco to Django to Liszt, very few are familiar with the sad and fascinating trajectory of Romani history. Their collective tongue is a fossil dialect of Hindi, and some two hundred years ago linguists were able to trace this mysterious people's homeland to northern India. No one knows why they began their wanderings, but in the middle ages they were employed as musicians by the Persians and Turks, and then as slaves by the ancient Romanian kings, including Vlad the Impaler. Despite their heavy concentration in the Balkans, and the tendency for many to confuse "Romani" with "Romanian", they continued to wander throughout Europe. Their closely guarded customs and darker appearance generally precluded assimilation with the "Gadjo" or non-Romani, and thus they have always occupied a much-maligned position in European society. (Their near annihilation during the Holocaust has been almost completely ignored until recent years.) Esma Redzepova is a Macedonian Gypsy singer and was crowned "Queen of the Gypsies" in India some thirty years ago. Many will be familiar with her from the film "Gypsy Caravan" and I was particularly moved by brief clips of her from Macedonian tv in the sixties or seventies. I can't seem to find any better quality videos than this but it's still fascinating. If anyone knows how to get a hold of her older recordings I would love to know.
