Mark Fry / The A. Lords - I Lived in Trees

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4...according to our Clinton on Fri 30 Sep, 2011.

Mark Fry is best known for an acid folk album 'Dreaming of Alice' recorded in 1972 but like much of these 'lost' albums dained prominence when the great and good (ie: Jim O Rourke and Kieran Hebden) name checked it as a classic and it received a re-issue on the hip Sundazed imprint. Now 39 years after that landmark album and with the likes of Plinth's Mike Tanner and Directorsound's Nick Palmer on board Mark Fry returns in a Vashti Bunyan-esque rise from the ashes. The comparisons with Bunyan aren't just reserved for the back story, the music has a similar rural folk feel to it and the hippy-ish air of someone who has been cryogenically frozen in the idealistic early 70's. The music is slow moving, churning almost soporific. Fry's guitar playing is full of beautiful full rolling folk chords and his singing has a youthful innocence not the worn raggedy leathery voice of many of his vintage. He has a neat way with a chord change exemplified on the likes of 'Chalky Down' where the music shifts like the rolling sea. Its beautiful stuff, absolutely perfect for a late afternoon nap by a gaggle of trees in this stunning Indian summer.

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CD album in luxurious 8 panel concertina sleeve designed by renowned Spanish illustrator, Iker Spozio. A recent ‘featured artist’ on Stuart Maconie’s BBC 6Music Freakzone radio show, Mark Fry is best known for his 1972 psyche-folk classic Dreaming of Alice, a record that became a noughties underground cause célèbre thanks to name-checks by the likes of Jim O’Rourke and Fourtet’s Kieran Hebden. Long settled in Normandy and enjoying a successful career as a painter, interest in his musical juvenilia came as a great surprise to Mark, who nonetheless relished the renewed interest enough to start recording again – a guitar having always been propped up against his painting studio wall. A ‘getting-back-on-the-horse’ new album, Shooting the Moon, duly appeared in 2008, after which Fry was courted by two young Dorset idyll-summoners: Mike Tanner (a.k.a. Plinth and a member of United Bible Studies, among myriad other arcane, leftfield outlets) and Nick Palmer (who records as Directorsound). The multi-instrumentalist pair, having christened themselves The A. Lords, quickly set about furnishing Mark with some timelessly hazy, art-folk musical backings over which the thoroughly rejuvenated singer-songwriter could unfurl his dream-like lyrics and gorgeously meandering vocal melodies. The result is I Lived in Trees: a gloriously drowsy, bucolic folk vision, pulled into Technicolor focus by Lemon Jelly’s Nick Franglen at the mixing desk, and etched with The A. Lords classical guitars, Mellotrons and deft chamber arrangements – all of it in service of Mark Fry’s magically timeless lyrical reveries. It is, effectively, Dreaming of Alice’s true follow-up, a mere 39 years down the track. “The Mark Fry album is brand new, though sounds rather compellingly as if it was recorded in 1971…” (John Mulvey, Uncut ‘Wild Mercury Sound’)

Tracklist:

1. I Lived In Trees
2. Behold The Nereids Under The Green Sea
3. Chalky Down
4. We All Fall Down
5. All Day Long
6. La Lune
7. Ruins Of Stone
8. Even The Sky
9. Taking Wing

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