Volcanic Tongue: Underground Music Mailorder & Shop

	John Fahey The Yellow Princess Vanguard VMD-79293 CD £13.99 On the back of the late-60s freak/folk boom Fahey joined the likes of Buffy Sainte-Marie, Country Joe & The Fish, Peter Walker and Richard & Mimi Farina on Vanguard and recorded two great albums, Requia and The Yellow Princess. Of the two, 1968's The Yellow Princess remains the strongest side, showcasing some of his most dazzling playing while including experiments in electric group composition with members of Randy California's Spirit and one-time Byrds drummer Kevin Kelley. If the album feels a little more self-consciously adventurous than the last few Takoma titles - and the electric group tracks a little out of synch with the rest of the record - Fahey's solo playing is uniformly jaw-dropping, especially on the gloriously ornate title track and the ferociously atonal "Lion". "The Singing Bridge Of Memphis, Tennessee" is one of his eeriest compositions for turntable, guitar and tape, giving voice to architecture in the way that only Fahey could. Highly recommended.
	John Fahey The Voice Of The Turtle Takoma CDTAK-1019 CD £11.99 1968's The Voice Of The Turtle continues with parts three and four of "A Raga Called Pat" from Days Have Gone BY - again split across the end of side one and the beginning of side two on the original vinyl edition - and takes the phantom use of tapes, records and found sounds to a whole other level of personal hermeneutics. Reptilian imagery - specifically coelacanths and turtles - play a central role in Fahey's personal mythology, nearly always standing in as some kind of signifier of genitalia. "When I was about four or five I saw what I thought was a penis walking across the front lawn," Fahey told Pouncey in The Wire. "It was just a box turtle, but it kind of upset me..." Many critics still regard The Voice Of The Turtle, with it's conflation of personal, religious and fake biographical detail and spurious musical credits, as the equivalent of a dick joke. But it's one of the most endlessly fascinating and genuinely experimental entries in Fahey's whole catalogue. The Voice Of The Turtle was originally issued in two radically different versions with totally different music despite featuring the same track listing on the sleeve and certain sections don't feature Fahey at all, including moments lifted from different 78s, snippets of hymns, gamelan music, custard sucking fiddle tunes, Gregorian chant and enough weird cross-cultural illusions to spawn a whole host of interpretative schools. Indeed, it's possible to read the two otherwise-inexplicable deep bass notes that bracket the entire album as a massive set of quotation marks. The first issue is particularly desirable, with a gatefold sleeve that featured endless liners as well as a book of mysteriously-captioned photographs that cost Takoma more to manufacture than they actually charged for it. It was subsequently withdrawn and reissued in a single pocket sleeve (in two subtly altered variations that focus on the cross-hatching detail in the turtle's eye) that made it feel even more like buying a jigsaw puzzle that already had a whole bunch of missing pieces. Fahey himself never admitted to any knowledge of the differences between versions, further contributing to a cult of rumours that seems unlikely ever to be fully resolved. This edition is full remastered, revealing even more subliminal, occult detail. Highly recommended.
	John Fahey & His Orchestra Old Fashioned Love Takoma CDTAK-6511 CD £11.99 Reissue of this 1974 album that closes with Fahey's magisterial reading of the hymn "Dry Bones In The Valley (I Saw The Light Come Shining 'Round And 'Round)" after running through a set of orchestral arrangements with a bunch of LA jazz musicians (including the beautifully titled "The Assassination Of Stephan Grossman") and a series of duos with guitarist Woodrow Mann. The duos are particularly gorgeous, with the two playing through a Leslie cabinet for some orchestral reverb. This re-issue features extensive sleevenotes by Samuel Charters.
	John Fahey Yes! Jesus Loves Me Takoma CDTAK-7085 CD £11.99 Despite John Fahey's notoriously combative, curmudgeonly character and his lack of truck with "fake sentimentality and phony emotionalism", he was a sucker for Christmas records, old hymns and schmaltzy seasonally-themed collections of songs and he cut a series of these records across his career that constituted the bulk of his best selling sides. 1968's The New Possibility sold over 100, 000 copies. But by far the most rewarding of these is 1980's collection of "guitar hymns", Yes! Jesus Loves Me, coincidentally Fahey's worst-selling Takoma record due to a combination of wretched cover art and phasing problems with the initial vinyl cut. Up until now it has also been badly served on CD, only briefly available as part of a twofer with Maria Muldaur's Gospel Night. So this brand new full-reissue comes as so much gravy for the hardened Fahey nut, complete with liners by Kris Needs. The incredible compositional liberties that Fahey takes with the various readings and the way he plays around with the elemental melodies is fairly jaw-dropping and he brings a weight of ideas and execution to the table that is not commonly associated with Christmas fluff. His reading of "Stand Up, Stand Up For Jesus" ranks up there alongside Sandy Bull's setting of William Byrd's "No Nobis Domine" as one of the most striking modernist/traditional amalgams ever couched in avant garde strings. "Christ is not cute," Fahey insisted.
	John Fahey The Mill Pond & Collected Paintings Important Records Imprec-183 CD £8.99 Reissue of a very hard to find double 7” set, originally released in 1997 and long out of print. Recorded in Fahey’s Oregon hotel room, this set works as some kind of bridge between his earlier compositional style and the more overtly damaged sound of Womblife and City Of Refuge while remaining more straightforwardly beautiful than either of those two. Fahey’s acoustic guitar has a stationary gamelan quality which sits real nice and his whistles and wordless vocals work in much the same way as the train recordings did on his earlier sides. Other tracks are more abstract, with attacks of steel slide mutated by a storm of F/X. Great to have this back in print and the package is further bolstered by the inclusion of a full-colour booklet with a bunch of snaps of rarely scene original art by Fahey. Comes in deluxe letterpressed sleeves.
	John Fahey Visits Washington, D.C. Takoma CDTAK-1069 CD £12.99 The final CD in Takoma’s on-going Fahey reissue program, Visits Washington, D.C. was released in 1979 and remains one of the lesser known – though highly rewarding – sides in his voluminous back catalogue. It’s a collection that balances inspired cover versions – Doc Watson’s “Silver Bell”, Bill Monroe’s “Cheyenne”, Leo Kottke’s “Death By Reputation”, Bola Sete’s “Guitar Lamento” – with extensive re-thinks of earlier themes and inventions, peaking with dizzyingly complex “The Grand Finale” which interweaves modes lifted from a clutch of totemic Fahey inventions and previously sketched heads. Great to have this one back in print. Comes with Fahey’s original liners and new notes from Kris Needs.