MARK FRY / THE A. LORDS - I Lived In Trees

When I was a boy

Dreaming down on my world

Among the many talents of Glen Johnson, one must certainly count his knack for "exhuming" artists who've faded into obscurity or retired from the scene ages ago: back in 2002, a track on "Writers Without Homes" brought back the voice of Vashti Bunyan, more than thirty years after her "Just Another Diamond Day".

Now, in his role as co-head of the Second Language label, Johnson seems intent on indulging in more such endeavours: just a few months after Pete Astor's splendid "Songbox" – an artist as sparing and sporadic as he is never truly inactive – the label, by now established for the care of its packaging and the refinement of its musical choices, is hosting the fruits of a meeting between the A. Lords and Mark Fry.

If the former are none other than Michael Tanner aka Plinth and Nicholas Palmer aka Directorsound, Fry's name is one that will be unfamiliar to most today, yet it has been the object of a nearly forty-year-old cult following a single, solitary album, curiously released in Italy back in 1972. The story (or legend) surrounding that cult record has it that Fry, hailing from a family of Bristol artists and at the time a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, was introduced to producer Vincenzo Micocci who, struck by his songs, arranged for him to record an album through an RCA subsidiary and later to open live for Lucio Dalla. Even before the record came out, Fry returned home, where he went on playing with various musicians but never again made an album under his own name. Meanwhile, over the years, a small cult of fans and collectors grew up around that strange album titled "Dreaming With Alice", which has seen copies sell for over two thousand pounds, inclusion among the twenty most important acid-folk albums according to Record Collector, and widespread appreciation from critics and musicians alike, including Kieran Hebden and Colleen.

In 2008 – "just" thirty-six years after that hidden gem – Fry returned to the scene with fifteen songs under his own name, collected on an album titled "Shooting The Moon", while the rest is recent history, starting with his meeting with Glen Johnson, who describes the now sixty-year-old Fry first and foremost as an excellent drinking companion (!).

Whatever the real genesis of "I Lived In Trees" might be, its nine tracks sketch bucolic vignettes utterly out of time, in which the unwitting mentor meets up with younger epigones, lending their aphasic compositions a still-visionary songwriting touch, even though he has consigned Alice's dreams to the realm of memory and now tends to give himself over to a dimension that turns from ascetic to intimate, from visionary to contemplative.

The collaboration between the artists involved grew incrementally, with Fry taking charge of writing the lyrics and adding vocal parts to the music composed by Tanner and Palmer, all of it geared towards recreating the pagan sensations of total immersion in nature and its sounds, including rustling leaves and birdsong, which sit alongside textures, rich yet extremely delicate, created through the use of a wide array of instrumentation, ranging from flutes to harp, from piano to accordion to mellotron.

Pipes and narcoleptic arpeggios draw us straight into the atmosphere of a longed-for Arcadia, while limpid, serene melodies unveil a daydream, stretched out on the fresh grass of the moor, as an ageless minstrel recounts naturalistic metaphors steeped in a melancholy autumnal dew.

The magic and mystery of "I Lived In Trees" dusts off the dreamy aura of a young, flowing-haired Fry, yet brings it back into the present of an artist whose spirit remains unchanged but who, in keeping with the time that has passed, carefully measures out his now deeper, lower vocal timbre, adapting it to the graceful, very slow movements of the two younger musicians' compositions. From the dripping notes of the opening title track to the drowsy intimacy of the first part of "All Day Long", via the Victorian minimalism of "We All Fall Down" (which might even bring to mind Montgolfier Brothers) and the acid disenchantment of "Even The Sky", the album is one fine cameo after another, miniatures in slow, vaguely unsettling motion, almost acting as a counterpoint to the ecstatic rural calm of most of the tracks.

That said, "I Lived In Trees" is not without thornier twists, as in the interlude of hisses and deconstructed notes on "We All Fall Down", nor is it lacking in romantic, and in a sense pop, openings, such as the delightful "Ruins Of Stone", which packs into little more than two minutes a dreamlike melodic fluidity and a melancholy depiction of the ruins of a vanished world.

What remains alive and present, merely transformed, is instead the class of a truly singular artist, who in collaborating with musicians usually engaged on other fronts has found a new dimension, credible and far removed from the mere repetition of a self now lost in the mists of time. Credit goes to those who made the encounter happen and the record's release possible: Alice has stayed behind in her Wonderland, while Mark Fry has thankfully been tracked down in his hideout among the trees.

PS: the album's artwork, produced as an eight-panel accordion-fold edition, was created by illustrator Iker Spozio; while the copies reserved for the label's subscribers include a 3" cd-r with a further thirteen minutes of music recorded between Normandy and Dorset, plus a small packet of rowan seeds... so that the trees are not merely figurative, but real.

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16/10/2011