This, my friends, is what DIY recording is all about. Amps for Christ mainman Henry Barnes makes music too out of step, too varied and too fucked up for anyone to front him the money for serious studio time. It's never going to happen. But instead of becoming bitter and frustrated, he records his music carefully and cheaply and releases it on labels like Shrimper-- imprints unconcerned with image, fashion or sales. This process gives him the opportunity to realize his wide-ranging vision of machine-damaged folk music. The Oak in the Ashes feels like a yellowed artifact from a parallel world, one where Celtic drones, beat poetry, African percussion, Persian ballads, classic-rock guitar solos, power tools and free jazz all find equal footing. I like this place.
The 23 tracks on The Oak in the Ashes are carefully selected and sequenced so that no single style of music ever becomes too prevalent, and listener fatigue never sets in. "She's With Me" and "Give/Leave" are both lovely folk songs in the British style, combining plucked acoustic guitar, fiddle and spare use of feedback, the latter even adding just a bit of Lynyrd Skynyrd to the mix. The anthemic guitar instrumental "Scotland the Brave/Ditches" has Barnes tuning his Les Paul like a bagpipe and running it through the distortion pedal. "Nese 1" and "Nese 2" are both Middle Eastern folk songs, with Tara Tikki Tavi offering vocals in (I believe) Persian, accompanied by Barnes' acoustic guitars and assorted percussion.
The iffy tracks on The Oak in the Ashes are confined to the spoken word pieces, most of which find Barnes reciting Ginsberg-inspired poetry about the environment over a drumbeat. The words aren't particularly embarrassing, they just add little to the overall thrust of the album. Fortunately, these pieces are short interludes of a minute or less, so their presence is never terribly distracting. And it's well worth sitting through these to hear the unusual textures Barnes wrings out of his various homemade instruments on "She Saw" and "Scotland the Brave/Cheeks" (a reprise of the drone melody of "Scotland the Brave/Ditches" translated to some wheezing keyboard instrument). The live and crudely recorded "Mission Accomplished" begins with somebody tuning up a power drill and then the machine competes in a furious duet with a Coltrane-inspired sax on a tune that would fit right in on Crescent. The screams from the players as the track fades out attests to their enthusiasm.
The eight-minute "Prepared Hammond for 5 Hands" closes the album with a blast of the kind of noisy "power electronics" Barnes contributes to Eric Wood's Bastard Noise project, a dense amalgamation of machine skree and analog electronics that manages to remain just this side of annoying. It's a fitting end to this document of one man's inspiring vision. Most everyone will love and hate at least one track here, but I'm glad to know that we're living in an age when a record this weird and all over the place is only a click or two away.
