Mark Fry - South Wind Clear Sky

Perhaps still most widely recognized for DREAMING WITH ALICE, his 1972 Psych-Folk debut for RCA Italy as a 19-year-old art student-troubadour, Mark Fry has been turning his creative gaze on the world, and alchemizing it's elements into shimmering, quietly visionary works of art, ever since. Sung with that now familiar alloy of cool restraint and wondering innocence, and passingly reminiscent of the kind of English pastoralism associated with the likes of Kevin Ayers or Bill Fay, SOUTH WIND CLEAR SKY's leanly arranged yet immersive songs are propelled by Mark's glinting, plangent guitars and deliciously embroidered by John Parker's double bass, Angèle David-Guillou's piano and backing vocals and Katie Lang's French horn, all bound together by producer Guy Fixsen (My Bloody Valentine, Stereolab) into a delightfully iridescent whole. For all it's finely honed arrangements, and the translucence of it's recording, SOUTH WIND CLEAR SKY is still very much the work of the man who made DREAMING WITH ALICE.