PRICE:
$16.50
IN STOCK
ARTIST
TITLE
Rev Galen
FORMAT
10"

LABEL
CATALOG #
OKRAINA 007LP OKRAINA 007LP
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
2/24/2017

2015 release. In the company of Gilles Poizat (guitar, trumpet, voice), Catherine Hershey sings the poems of her grandfather Galen E. Hershey, pastor-farmer in Pontiac, Michigan. The poems come from a collection of poetry written between 1946 and 1976. Features Frédéric Jean on whistle on "Dilemma & Decision". Mixed by Gilles Olivesi; Mastered by Harris Newman; Illustration by Gwénola Carrère. Florian Caschera on the release: "As his name readily admits, this disc of tranquil hallucination (but beware) bursts forth in all its absurd duration around eight poems that fire the Reverend Galen Hershey, grandfather of Catherine Hershey, who sings here, recorded more or less in secret, in his notebooks. They are simple and beautiful poems, which have the simplicity and beauty of poems which are recorded more or less secretly in notebooks. The secret of the notebooks is more or less the simplest and the most beautiful of the secrets... Gilles Poizat, trembling in the reverb of a patient guitar, tells his furtive notes like a string of bones, and pulls a trumpet the kind of subtly diffracted traits that are heard on Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom (1974), whistles as we hide to cry and sing like a baby whale dreaming (or he shouts, like Jad Fair stuck at the top of the slide, it could make you laugh but it's heartbreaking). Catherine Hershey, eyes wide open on what comes out of her mouth and makes of this smoke, gives to her melodies the curve of the most intriguing calves. They are sad and full songs, somewhat veiled, whose hearts overflow everywhere, but with a quiet dawn sure of its dawn legitimacy. As all the music summons another, one will think of the rhymes of Ivor Cutler, the refrain of Pearl in The Night of the Hunter (1955), to the sweetest ballads of Shirley Collins, to some Elizabethan airs as they were already, in another life, made effervescent by Syd Barrett. We will think of it without it hindering us in anything. And then we will not think at all, too busy to look after our blues, these exquisite blues bring our souls the songs which we know will never be forgotten."