Ed Askew - Imperfiction

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5...according to our Brian on Thu 10 Mar, 2011.

Now this album is a bloody treasure. Ed is a cult folk icon, a gay hippy outsider from back in the day whose descent into obscurity never dimmed his penchant for penning raw, heartfelt & lilting chunks of dream-like melancholia. He really does rip at your heartstrings with his "Leonard Cohen meets Daniel Johnston at Jonathan Richman's house" vocal style and beautifully naive harpsichord playing! The tunes have that lullaby quality in parts. He also sounds like he's playing to two disinterested couples in an almost empty dive at the end of the universe. His songs are warm, humorous, love-lorn, poetic & charming as hell. Also, due to the fact these are dusty home-recorded songs from the 80s, committed casually to 2 track tape, their lo-fi hiss adds another fascinating dimension to proceedings. You feel like you've stumbled on a magical relic even though on 'House of Embers' he kind of resembles an eccentric uncle attempting to re-create a Dylan-esque musical dimension on rustic acoustic & harmonica . I'm just as moved & exhilarated by this album as I am the similarly mystical UFO by Jim Sullivan - an altogether different collection of immaculate outsider folk wonderment.

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Anyone who loves ‘outsider’ folk legends from Tom Rapp to Roy Harper or Gary Higgins to Peter Grudzien knows the name of the legendary bard Ed Askew. His 1968 ESP Record ‘Ask The Unicorn’ is quite simply one of the era’s finest artifacts, full of lilting, prickly, chiming songs of loss, love and escapism - maybe the gay "Astral Weeks" for the underground. Around the turn of the century, an equally compelling second album surfaced, "Little Eyes", where our hero, armed only with tiple (a sort of latin uke/banjo/guitar), laid out more heartbreaking baroque odes, all recorded in a single continuous take! Recorded for ESP in 1970, it never got past the test pressing stage and was eventually lost, until de Stijil came sniffing some thirty years on.

After the 70s things get a bit foggy - the odd radio session, some live performances, a lot of painting - but there were no more proper albums to melt into. There wasn’t an audience really, or more importantly, a label that believed in him. Fortunately in the early 80s, Ed got his hands on a harpsichord and tiple and a simple two-track recorder and laid down some of his tunes he’d been carrying around for years. Released only on cassette in miniscule quantities in 1984, "Imperfiction" contains the same emotionally raw yet wry observations, in a decidedly no-frills sonic setting. Broken glass on the sidewalk outside, nice boys he meets in bars, and the joyous act of songwriting itself are all fair game for subject matter, giving a unique and intimate self-portrait of a truly gifted songwriter.

"Imperfiction" is now available for the first time on vinyl via Galactic Zoo Disk / Drag City, with vintage photos and liners and sound that will transport fans back to the old days of Askew in all of its seemingly transient glory.

Fans of Daniel Johnson, early Jonathan Richman, Smog, Palace Brothers and other lo-fi troubadours would be wise to snatch up this pressing.

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