The Djukella Orchestra's brand new studio album, carefully crafted to soothe the soul and remind you it's the world, rather than you that has been going insane.
Comes in a beautiful gatefold case, with a 24 page booklet filled with musings, lyrics and some glorious photos by Yasmine Zarrouk and various others.
Includes unlimited streaming of The Fruitful Fells
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
For Dr. Tom Peterson, Claire Cooper-Tognoli, Peter Franklin Vlach, Ste Goodall, Pav Mastihi, Alan Moorhouse and all the molten heroes snatched from us too soon.
In 2003 the WTO came to Taiwan (that’s to say Taiwan was finally admitted to the World Trade Organisation after years of lobbying from the US and and counter-lobbying from China) and suddenly, as if by magic, we were allowed to drink more than two kinds of beer.
Until that point, I’d been living for three years on that island utopia, quite accidentally as it happens, where despite a monumental black-market and rampant international sculduggery of the highest order, the populace were provided with sustenance, libation, services and cigarettes through government monopolies whose graphics departments had most likely been drafted in en-masse from a 1970s wallpaper manufacturer. At unlikely locations in the mountains, vending machines would stand, unsullied by thief nor vandal, offering the standard selection - Asparagus Drink, one with lumps of tapioca in it, one with suspiciously square chunks of a vegetable I can’t quite place, another with beans, and an energy drink called Super-Supao, all in cans printed two-tone, seemingly without an undercoat, directly onto the metal.
Taiwan Beer came in a white can with a blue design and tasted firmly of factory, made mostly of rice and maize, with just a hint of rats. It did the trick, but that was largely because there was no other choice. If you were lucky, you could find the other beer, Tawain Draft Beer, which came in a tall green bottle, on a seemingly irregular basis at various tiny corner shops in mountain villages, particularly if you strayed higher into aboriginal communities. This was some fine beer, certainly in comparison to the other, with an added layer of excitement as they were bottle-conditioned with live yeast, and if you failed to drink fast enough on a warm evening, one would invariably explode, showering the assembled company with beer and shattered glass, lending a yeasty tang to the sultry tropical mildew of our apartments.
All of a sudden, cheese became something that one could purchase from a swanky shop downtown (rather than having to bribe incoming Europeans to smuggle in suitcases of parmesan, cheddar or halloumi), olive-oil and other exotic rarities began to appear on supermarket shelves, and the deeply cosmopolitan 24 hour Eslite Book Store in Taipei opened up a music section to rival anything I’d seen in “the west”.
The first time I wandered into the place, in a sunken, glazed, sound-proofed dell in the midst of mile upon mile of book-shelves, I was in seventh heaven. In two sections, “jazz’ and “folk”, it was possible to find some of the greatest and most collectible records and CDs imaginable, from Ruben Gonzalez to Steeleye Span, Coltrane to Keith Jarrett, The Mothers of Invention to The Labour Exchange Band. Amongst the finds on that first trip was one that really blew my mind. Having been wandering alone in India to a soundtrack of bootlegged cassettes, then working in Bangkok and Taipei, I’d rather fallen out of the loop of record releases, and was amazed to find that Robin Williamson (of Incredible Stringband fame) had released an album of songs fashioned from Dylan Thomas’ poems, on East German avant-garde jazz label ECM. This I had to have.
Unlike some of Robin’s later forays on ECM, this one isn’t cloistered in a cacophony of jarring Scandinavian horn-players and rattling gurdies, but features Robin alone, singing and speaking Thomas’ liquid words accompanied only by classach, guitar or mandola. His versions of On No Work of Words, The Seed at Zero and Poem on his Birthday, to name but three, are truly sublime, but the one which really stuck with me right from the beginning was this song, written by Robin to close the album. The last couple of stanzas struck me as such a poignant description of our times, and that was nearly twenty years ago. Rather like Guy Forsyth’s classic, Hometown Boy, the true relevance and indeed resonance of the lyric is only revealed by the inevitable, if ominously cyclical plod of time.
It was this song above all, along with a Richard Thompson live album, long-since discontinued everywhere else, bought on the very same trip to the bookshop, that got me back into playing guitar and reminded me that singing songs to people is the thing I like to do most. Trying to find people who’d listen to me belt out obscure verse about long dead poets was another matter, and something I continue to work on to this day.
The irony of so tangibly enjoying the coming of the WTO after having spent large parts of 1999 protesting against the very same was not lost on me, but life often has ways of revealing the flip-side of things in unlikely places.
credits
from The Fruitful Fells,
released July 6, 2021
Jez - Voice/Guitar
Nye Parsons - Double-bass
James Patrick Gavin - Violin
Recorded by Mike West at Ninth Ward Pickin Parlor
Mastered by Nick Watson at Fluid Mastering
Just another Superb well delivered album by this wonderful versatile artist very well recorded produced its a must for anyone's collection. Nancys vocals are brilliant as ever..
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