Mark Fry
Dreaming With Alice

Do you happen to have an original of this acid folk record "Dreaming With Alice"? Wikipedia reports it was sold for 4061 euro. Three years ago...

Mark Fry, a native of Essex, a student of futuristic art at the Accademia delle Bell Arti in Florence around 1970 and, in his very first experiences as a timid folksinger, a great admirer of Lucio Dalla, just when he was recording "Dreaming with Alice" was welcomed by the latter onto the bandwagon of a tour, becoming its supporter. It was his marvelous apprenticeship. Let's not forget what Dalla was in those years, his provocative originality, the charisma of the character, who after scandalizing Sanremo was about to collaborate with Roberto Roversi. Fry, however, disappeared after a while. He returned to his homeland, to start a career as an avant-garde painter, if today such a term still has any meaning. He was neither the first nor the last musician to make this choice: let us remember the release in 1972 of the impressive "Tarot", an apocalyptic progressive masterpiece by the Swiss painter Walter Wegmüller.

But let's move on to Fry's work. The title track is distributed, with a relatively original choice, throughout the entire spine of the album in ten fragments, resurfacing elements of discourse that confirm the status of a concept album. One of the most effective tracks immediately arrives, "The Witch": a lysergic gallop, where the bass and percussion cadences interweave with the string and, at times, wind phrases. Who is being talked about, a siren, a witch? The answer gets lost in Fry's swirling smoke, who between sitars and mandolins accompanies the listener, to put it in Carrollian terms, beyond the looking glass. By the way: don't ask him for brevity, a rare feature among psychedelic authors. But Fry also knows how to prune and limit himself to the play of reflections that illuminates even compositions of much less breath (as in "A Norman Soldier", a rêverie). If "Song For Wild" has a more elegiac gait compared to the first track, recalling a brief idyll like "Mother Nature's Son", the splendid "Roses for Columbus" starts low, like absorbed contemplation, then becomes insistent. Fry's discreet singing alternates with the crystalline flickering of the guitars, which evokes a flight among the heights of imagination; the long tail is made of sighs, in waves. The same alternates with "Lute And Flute", with its evocative backing vocals and well-structured mélange. The flute punctuates the choral conclusion.

Sometimes you're surprised: for example, "Down Narrow Streets" is a track of overwhelming freshness, with notable instrumental exuberance, akin to the unfolding of a sound rose; yet it leaves an impression of incompleteness. This, on the other hand, does not clash with the overall atmosphere breathed in the album. Configuring as a "concept", it can afford - and must impose, in some aspects - even scattered brushstrokes, but always functional to the overall picture. The piece that conquered me, if in such an organic album we can speak of pieces, is "Mandolin Man", a sort of manifesto in which the author paints himself as a mandolin-man roaming the world. And so roams his music, now hesitant, now impetuous, now measured (see from minute 30:20 of the album), now subdued. Between an acceleration and a momentary stall, fissures that become abysses open, slashes, then leaps and impatient meticulous embroideries, then again authentic explosions, in a crescendo that ends with a change in rhythm and, finally, in a new, final crescendo that suffocates the finale.

We also find less creative oddities: the album closes with a track recorded with reversed voice and music, with a title also reversed, "Rehtorb Ym No Hcram", an interesting sound obstacle course that, if you'll allow the synesthesia, seems made of jelly. The gimmick isn't very original, especially since "Rain" (those Beatles always resurface...), but it's worth mentioning the perfect harmony of the song with the rest of the work.

As we said, Fry left Italy, established himself as a visual artist and disappeared from circulation, much like the magnificent Vashti Bunyan between "Just Another Diamond Day" (1970) and "Lookaftering" (2005), so much that his second album, more conventional, would only come out in 2008: "Shooting the Moon". From there on he has not stopped, writing again - I would recommend listening to the sweetly melancholic "South Wind Clear Sky" (2014) - and even performing on tour, for example in three concerts in Tokyo in 2013. If we look at certain folk of adamantine originality, the genius of John Fahey or Bridget St John is another thing. However, try spending about forty minutes with the "mandolin-man", his hallucinated fantasies, his aerial chords, and you will find them not entirely wasted.