Billy Jenkins: The Semi-Detached Suburban Home (Music for Low Strung Guitar)

Rating: ★★★

Record and Artist Details

Musicians:

Billy Jenkins (p)

Label:

VOTP

June/2014

Catalogue Number:

7

RecordDate:

date not available

Raise a glass to a masterpiece in miniature. Thirty solo tracks, with barely three breaking the two minute barrier, these recordings date back to the mid-1990s but remain timeless. Moved to re-tune his acoustic down two whole tones, and then record the songs in different rooms of his then south London abode, Jenkins evokes a sound that is at once intimate, at times painfully personal, yet it is never less than magical. So brief are these cries and whispers, your own imagination adds qualities to these Satie-like sighs; one moment that low bass suggests a Leadbelly rattle and hum, suddenly there's a Ralph Towner sonority, then we're all atonal and crazed like Derek Bailey has parachuted in from the spirit world; yet ‘Reluctant How Do's’ has a whiff of zithery Karas, while John Fahey's never far away, notably on blues-folk call outs like ‘Steps and Front Door’. But the musician really at play here is of course the irrepressible Jenkins, semi-detached from our quotidian world, but very attached to his musical one.

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