MARK FRY-Dreaming With Alice
Mark Fry (born 4 November 1952) is an English painter and psychedelic folk musician. He is best known for his album Dreaming With Alice, released in 1972, which has been hailed as a psychedelic folk classic by critics, and a diverse range of musicians. Original copies of the album are much sought after and have sold for in excess of £2,000.
Full album play...listne & read on
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OskBZi309do
01 Dreaming With Alice
02 The Witch
03 Dreaming With Alice (Verse 2)
04 Song For Wild
05 Dreaming With Alice (Verse 3)
06 Roses For Colombus
07 A Norman Soldier
08 Dreaming With Alice (Verse 4-5)
09 Dreaming With Alice (Verse 6)
10 Lute And Flute
11 Dreaming With Alice (Verse 7)
12 Down Narrow Streets
13 Dreaming With Alice (Verse 8)
14 Mandolin Man
15 Dreaming With Alice (Verse 9-10)
16 Rehtorb Ym No Hcram
Mark Lewis Fry was born in Epping, Essex, into a family of artists descended from the Quaker founders of the Bristol-based chocolate business J. S. Fry & Sons. His father is the painter Anthony Fry. Mark Fry is a cousin of Roger Fry, the artist, critic and member of the Bloomsbury Group.
Fry was educated at Dartington Hall School in Devon. On leaving Dartington in 1970 he enrolled at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence, Italy, where he studied painting under the Futurist Primo Conti.
Dreaming With Alice
During Fry's time in Italy he was introduced to the record producer Vincenzo Micocci. On hearing some of Fry's songs, Micocci signed him to record label IT Dischi, a subsidiary of RCA. Dreaming with Alice was recorded by Fry and a band of session musicians in Rome over a three-day period in the summer of 1971. Following the recording session Fry toured Italy supporting singer Lucio Dalla.
Fry left Italy in autumn 1971 to return to England before Dreaming With Alice was released. He was sent a box of the records following the release on IT Dischi records in Italy in 1972, and had no further dealings with the label. For several years, Fry continued to perform music with various musicians including drummer Pete Thomas (later of Elvis Costello's band The Attractions), but without any associated record releases. In the early 1980s, after a long period of travel in the US and West Africa, Fry decided to return to London and pursue his career as an artist.
Unknown to Mark Fry, the album Dreaming With Alice had been developing cult status over the ensuing three decades as a psychedelic folk classic, garnering acclaim from critics and a new generation of musicians as diverse as Kieran Hebden (Four Tet),Colleen and Plastic Crimewave. Fry was to discover this by chance in the early 2000s (decade).
Dreaming With Alice is included in Record Collector's Top 20 Strange Folk Albums (Strange Folk Revisited, August 2009).
Mark Fry and Dreaming With Alice are featured in the anthology Galactic Ramble (Foxcote Press, 2009) as well as in Seasons They Change: The Story of Acid, Psych and Experimental Folk by Jeanette Leech (Jawbone Press, 2010).
The highest price paid at auction to date for an original copy of Dreaming With Alice was £2,327 in May 2009.
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In 2006, Sunbeam Records reissued a remastered version of the album Dreaming With Alice in the UK.
In January 2008, Fry released his second album, Shooting the Moon, an album of 15 songs penned over a number of years.
In November 2008, Fry was invited by Steve Krakow, also known as Plastic Crimewave, to appear at the fourth Million Tongues Event in Chicago.
In February 2009, Fry collaborated with Nick Franglen of Lemon Jelly on a new version of the title song of Dreaming With Alice, which was released as a limited edition vinyl single on Fruits de Mer Records.
In 2009 Fry was contacted by Dorset-based experimental musicians Michael Tanner and Nicholas Palmer, together known as The A. Lords. A musical collaboration ensued, and during 2009 and 2010 the three worked on new songs together, Fry adding lyrics and vocal parts to music composed and recorded by Palmer and Tanner.
In May 2010 Mark Fry and The A. Lords played at Bush Hall in London, where they were introduced by critic Will Hodgkinson on the occasion of Fry’s first performance on a London stage for over thirty years.
In August 2011 Second Language Records announced the impending release in September 2011 of the record created by Mark Fry, Nicholas Palmer and Michael Tanner, called I Lived In Trees by Mark Fry and The A.Lords.
-wiki
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Mark Fry is an English folk musician who has only released two albums in his time: this, his debut in 1972, and his second, entitled Shooting the Moon in 2008. A 36 year gap separates the two, and this is noticeable in both albums' respective sounds, his second record being a huge departure from the first.
Dreaming With Alice is considered by many to be the greatest psychedelic folk record ever made. Its structure is quite unique, with the title track broken up into 8 sections and interspersed through the album, each verse being sung before fading out into the other acid-tinged folk jams which make up the main body of the album. Comparisons to Donovan are easy to make, journalist Richie Unterberger said that Fry's style is "heavily reminiscent of Donovan's forays into [acid folk], but not as interesting.". While Fry does hint at something similar to Donovan, to think that his sound is a poor imitation of the aforementioned artist is simply misled; Unterberger seems to fail to see past the fact that they both have English accents and probably sees this as a stylistic similarity or some shit. But then he does write for allmusic so what can one expect?
This is all summer, but with a hidden edge. The jams get really deep at times with Fry's guitar playing off percussion, sitars, lutes and flutes in a psychedelic whirlwind. Despite its variation and journeying into instrumentally dense sections though, Dreaming With Alice consistently retains a very pastoral vibe; there's no real effort to evoke spacey imagery or anything like that, no, it's all English countryside in the summer with the dried out grass stalks, ladybirds, and midges swarming in the late afternoon sun. Songs like "Down Narrow Streets" and "Song for Wild" are perhaps the most intimate and beautiful moments on the record, when other instruments fall away and Fry is allowed the space to paint a picture of his own, with his gentle guitar finger-picking technique and his youthful, naïve voice. On the flip side of the coin there are also some pretty heavy psychedelic jams like the 8-minute "Mandolin Man" and the strange album closer "Rethorb Vm No Hcram", which is essentially the tapes of "Song for Wild" reversed.
Highly recommended for English folk aficionados and fans of the lighter side of psychedelic rock music.
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MARK FRY & THE A-LORDS/I Lived In Trees
I Lived In Trees
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kusZm57t184
Taking Wing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzYbmNJOlbY
SL013 Mark Fry/The A Lords I Lived in Trees
Released by RCA Italy with little fanfare in 1972, Mark Fry’s Dreaming With Alice is one of those very particular albums whose potency and poetry seem to owe everything to their era but whose virtues only gain traction, and with it coach-loads of interested parties, many years, if not the odd epoch, after their conception. Effectively a late-period psych-folk obscurity that became a record connoisseur’s Holy Grail once all things vaguely Incredible String Band-shaped became once again à la mode in the middle of the last decade, Dreaming With Alice, frequently bootlegged and described by Dream magazine as “one of those albums that feels like a secret you can’t wait to share”, had finally found its time and place.
All of which came as something of a surprise to the mature Mark Fry, by then long domiciled with wife Roxy and pug dog Missy in rural Normandy. He had recorded the suddenly-venerated album on the hoof as an itinerant, felt-hat-disporting, teenage art student during an idyllically hazy-sounding sojourn in Italy, several lifetimes ago. Subsequently devoting himself to painting (although intrepid travels, from Newfoundland to Timbuktu, also kept him busy), Mark, the son of an artist and the scion of Roger Fry, of Bloomsbury Set fame, was happily astonished to finds himself a belated cult music attraction and was soon pressed into reissuing his dimly recalled juvenilia to sate the long-deferred demand.
Duly inspired, Mark began to re-explore his songwriting (and new-fangled digital home recording), releasing Alice’s follow-up, Shooting The Moon, in 2008, a mere 36 years after its predecessor, and even dipping an assured toe in live performance. Subsequently hooking up, courtesy of the internet, with acclaimed Wessex exponents of all things musically arcane, The A. Lords (aka Mike Tanner and Nick Palmer, also sometimes known as Plinth and Directorsound, among innumerable other recording aliases) for shows and recording, Mark had stumbled upon like minds from a different generation, equipped with a splendidly esoteric instrumental arsenal and a shared predilection for the timelessly bucolic and the eccentrically English.
Working sporadically yet inexorably over much of the next three years, they would carefully hone the tracks that would become I Lived In Trees, Mark’s forthcoming opus, set for release by Second Language at the close of the summer. Recorded in Normandy, Dorset and Oxfordshire, it’s a chamber-folk album of instant, copasetic allure, hallmarked by Mark’s painterly take on existence and memory; its often affecting lyrics, rich in nature metaphors, etched with nostalgia or set in poignant dreamscapes, all leant clarity and an almost Zen-like stillness by the A. Lords. An exploration of landscape, at once external and internal, brimming with tunes that billow in like seeds on a breeze only to linger like hardy perennials, I Lived In Trees is the work of many hands, with subtle string arrangements by Steve Bentley-Klein and adroit mixing by Lemon Jelly’s Nick Franglen.
It’s taken a while, but it’s surely been worth it; and unlike Dreaming With Alice, this one won’t need a time machine to find its target audience.
'I Lived In Trees' comes as a CD album in luxurious 8 panel concertina sleeve designed by renowned Italian illustrator, Iker Spozio whose previous work includes artwork for Colleen, Delia Derbyshire, Hauschka and Tex La Homa.
http://www.ikerspozio.net/