![]() “My bread and butter has always been cyclical droning pieces, from years of being a Sandy Bull and John Fahey fan. I can’t imagine making something like that again though, but they loom large. That music is still influential because of how innovative and fearless it was. “I was just getting my start, and wearing my influences really hard on my sleeve. ![]() “The UK prog-folk records were a bit on the nose,” he says. Not one for standing still, Walker has also made two albums with jazz drummer Charles Rumback and a live record with Japanese psych-rockers Kikagaku Moyo. The evolution was advanced on 2018’s Deafman Glance, and Course In Fable completes the journey. By 2016’s Golden Songs That Have Been Sung, he was pointing towards more ambitious abstractions, less indebted to Martyn, Jansch and Tim Buckley. While he’s grateful for “the opportunities it brought me”, Walker says the troubadour stylings of 2014 debut All Kinds Of You and Primrose Green belong to a different era. I love prog that’s rooted in reality, not so much the dwarves and magical fairies.” Droney, feedbacky stuff, tapping, 12-string playing, fingerstyle, solos… Genesis is not prog with a capital P, they had a sense of humour. Steve Hackett was doing stuff nobody else did. “I wanted it to sound like if Peter Gabriel was on Thrill Jockey,” Walker explains, from his home in the hills of western Massachusetts. He’s calling it, with tongue only slightly in cheek, his prog album. It’s the furthest Walker has travelled from the Anglophile folk of 2015’s celebrated Primrose Green and, he says, “the most confident and put-together playing I’ve ever done on record”. Starting out at The Verve’s Nick McCabe, the first player to catch his ear as a child, Walker veers from Keith Richards, George Harrison and Jimmy Page to Robbie Basho, Bert Jansch and John Martyn, Steve Hackett, John Abercrombie and Derek Bailey, Sonny Sharrock, Jeff Parker and Bill Frisell, and on to Tom Morello and Thurston Moore.Ĭourse In Fable is a dazzling embodiment of a lifetime’s passion for guitars and guitarists, a near-virtuosic expression inspired by the fusion of genres in Chicago’s fertile 1990s scene, led by Tortoise and Gastr del Sol. We’re here to talk about Walker’s fifth solo album, Course In Fable, and along the way we cover a whole lot of ground. READ MORE: The Big Listen: Ryley Walker – Course In Fable.Secondly, his brain is like a well-thumbed encyclopedia volume on the great guitarists of our time. Firstly, he speaks with a restless, accelerated enthusiasm that’s hugely engaging. Cale Original During St.Two things about Ryley Walker become apparent early in our 40-minute interview. Widespread Panic Bust Out Willie Dixon’s “Spoonful,” Debut J.J. Reed Mathis to Perform Gamehendge Variation After Phish at The Greek Trey Anastasio and Page McConnell Discuss New LP ‘January’ on Phish Radio Primus, Members of Tool and More to Put on Benefit for Jimmy Haywardīorderland Festival Delivers 2023 Artist Lineup: Trey Anastasio with Classic TAB, Goose, moe. Joan Osborne to Perform the Music of Jerry Garcia and More at 10th Annual Dark Star Jubilee ![]() Tedeschi Trucks Band Treat NJPAC to Array of Euphonious Covers Leftover Salmon Announce New Reflective LP ‘Grass Roots’ with Billy Strings, Oliver Wood and More But in the right ears and in the right environment, it’s a sonic adventure worth taking. It ultimately explodes into a bit of kaleidoscopic, Velvet Underground-inspired drone-rock before dissolving into a sonic reprise of “Dampness’” opening theme and galloping off on a garage-band, guitar-and-percussion-driven coda.ĭeep Fried Grandeur is not for everyone. “Shrinks” is its counterpart’s opposite, looking toward the East in an amplified nod to Ravi Shankar with George Harrison’s western adaptations woven throughout. “Dampness” is one of two 18-minute tracks – “Shrinks the Day” is the other – that make up Deep Fried Grandeur, the new joint between Chicago-based American guitarist Ryley Walker and the Japanese psychedelic outfit known as Kikagaku Moyo.ĭead and Zep comparisons notwithstanding, it’s impossible to know where Ryley and the band come together – or, indeed, break apart – as this instrumental LP finds them fully integrated in a batch of sometimes-formless psychedelic soup that entertains in spite of itself. Eleven minutes in, “Pour Dampness Down in the Stream” blossoms into a percussive jam not unlike the Grateful Dead coming out of “Space” into “The Other One” or Led Zeppelin crashing into “In the Evening.”
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