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Review: 'FRY, MARK'
'South Wind, Clear Sky'   

-  Label: 'Second Language'
-  Genre: 'Folk' -  Release Date: '29th September 2014'-  Catalogue No: 'SL032'

Our Rating:
In 1972, when he was 19 and briefly enrolled as an art student in Florence, Mark Fry recorded Dreaming With Alice in Italy. He drew inspiration from early Pink Floyd and Donovan and was, in his own words, "investigating what it was like to be English".

Like Vashi Bunyan's Just Another Diamond Day and Linda Perhacs' Parallelograms its visionary qualities and quiet beauty were not immediately recognised and the record could easily have disappeared without trace.

Fortunately, although it was never released in the UK, some original pressings survived. These, and copies thereof, gradually established that this was one of those hidden gems lost in time.

Acclaim has since come from a new generation of Psych Folk musicians and fans. High profile admirers include Jim O'Rourke, Kieren Hebden and members of Tuung, Mercury Rev and Super Furry Animals.

It was 35 years before Fry released a second album 'Shooting The Moon' and 'I Lived In Trees' (2011) , also on second Language, continued the adventure.

Among the musicians who play on 'South Wind, Clear Sky', his fourth album, are John Parker (double bass), Angèle David-Guillou (piano and backing vocals) and Katie Lang (French horn). It is produced by Guy Fixsen who has worked with My Bloody Valentine and Stereolab.

Having built his name more as visual artist than a musician Fry is able to bring a painterly eye to the detail in his songs. This helps him to draw vivid word pictures such as on River Kings which is based upon his experience of living in the Inner Niger delta in Mali during the early 1980s.

The album title comes from Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai's Edo-period woodblock print series, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji and its cover photograph is of a snow-capped mountain range as seem from an aircraft.

Flying is a recurring theme, none more so than on the opening track,Aeroplanes, in which Fry sings "there's a hole in the sky for the dreamers on the ground". This is a hymn to the beauty of blue skies and high clouds but he also waxes lyrical about desert plains, deep seas and swimming with dolphins.

A similar oneness and wonderment of the natural world is also evident in Little Flashing Light where he sings "I can hear the universe spinning in my ear" while Along The Way is described as being a kind of “intergalactic love affair”.

Another inspiration is the writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, notably on Leave Me Where I Am which name checks the Frenchman's classic novella The Little Prince.

On the calming piano ballad ,Long Way Down which closes the album, there is nothing about rabbit holes yet while this entrancing album is not as overtly psychedelic as Dreaming With Alice, it shows that Fry has lost none of his free-spirited idealism.

Mark Fry's website
  author: Martin Raybould

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FRY, MARK - South Wind, Clear Sky