hough you may not have been able to extract much meaning from my garbled non-review of Vol. 4: The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party (which, to engage further in metacritical terms for a moment, found me too entangled with the circumstance surrounding my discovery of John Fahey’s music – i.e. his death and the subsequent color that it made an already somewhat grim work assume – to issue much in the way of a value judgement), I loved it. When buying the record I felt as if I was forcing myself out of the narrow confines of musical taste I’d found myself in then: tracing my spoors revealed an eroding interest in experimental electronic music, a dispassionate and skeptical glance at modern punk, a guiltily clinical interest in pop productions, and a frustrating tendency to repeat the same ten records I seemed to enjoy enough over and over again (three of these were scratchy funk 45s, and since I didn’t have a turntable in my dorm room, that narrowed things down a fair share). An excessive-bandwidth writ issued by my school’s network didn’t necessarily aid me in my quest for new music – though it seemed that a lot of what I downloaded would get deleted just as soon. Maybe I wasn’t giving things enough of a chance, but I knew what resonated with me (Mogwai’s “Punk Rock,” GZA et al.’s “4th Chamber”) when I heard it. John Fahey certainly did.


I thought it’d require some mental reconfiguring to get to like (or, rather, tolerate; my musical past teems with such abandoned projects) what was essentially unadorned bluegrass music after the fare I’d been weaned on; this wasn’t the case. As when Meat Beat Manifesto and Public Enemy offered up the apotheosis of what I’d been looking for in industrial music, only a great deal more listenable, my progress was organic. This really isn’t that surprising, now that I think of it, since Vol. 4 is as ardently experimental a guitar record (likewise with the musique concrete experiments of Fahey’s concurrent work on Vanguard Records) as they come. Bizarre tunings, murky reverberations, backwards effects, flute, etc. colored it with a variety of textures. One of its song titles could have summed things up aptly: “Guitar Excursions Into The Unknown.”


Nevertheless, Fahey dismissed it as entirely off the mark: this was an unknown he felt himself ill-suited to explore, at least for the time being. It was too pastoral, he claimed, or pastoral in exactly the wrong way. It was forced. (Would I say this? No.) And it was this imperative that led him to record The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death a few months later, as different a record as there could be, but entirely satisfying in many of the same ways.


Fahey excels at conjuring up a painstakingly developed sense of time and place in his playing, and if its predecessor at times accurately mapped out the restive confines of the dark night of the soul, this record no less vividly represents a (mildly acid-fried) return to the front porch and the prairie. The slightly damaged idyll of “Beautiful Linda Getchell,” which begins the album, seems like a Civil War artifact, containing no small amount of melancholy in its banjo accompaniment; the jaw-dropping “I Am The Resurrection,” which begins with a mystical overture of steel-guitar strums before accelerating into a stately main theme, also seems like the musical equivalent of a Daguerrotype.


The undeniable highlight of the album, and its most abstract composition, “On The Sunny Side Of The Ocean,” is plaintive and chilling, containing a number of startlingly well-timed, unexpected changes in key. Its counterparts, “101 Is A Hard Road To Travel ” and “How Green Was My Valley,” offer up occasionally lo-fi takes (Fahey, a fan of archaic recording who even planted his self-released 78s under the Blind Joe Death moniker in thrift shops, can even be heard shushing his dog near the end of the album) on standard bluesy progressions, yet with all the delicate shading Fahey has been known for. Despite the notes of familiarity announced in their titles, they remain just as unpredictable, complex, and evocative as any of Fahey’s previous, more aggressively daring work. In this sense, the album can be seen as a reassertion of purpose.


Of course, listening to this album and knowing virtually nothing about the art of guitar, I feel I’m depriving more musically-inclined readers of the nuts and bolts of how and why Fahey does what he does: my brief glances at the technical portion of the album’s liner confirm this. Nevertheless, as in the case of certain other famous John (who gave us alto, soprano, tenor, and the occasional entranced hum of religious fervor), knowledge of the artist’s technical prowess is inessential to an understanding of his passion and revolutionary spirit, to say nothing of feeling it in your bones.