Mark Fry, 'South Wind, Clear Sky' album launch

Event information

Perhaps still most widely recognised 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 alchemising its elements into shimmering, quietly visionary works of art, ever since. Certainly not an artist who dances to the music of time in any conventional sense, Mark, a respected, and collected, painter, most often to be found holed up in his Normandy farmhouse studio, allowed more than three decades to glide by before recording Alice’s follow up, 2008’s Shooting The Moon. His subsequent musical activity has been frenetic by comparison.

Mark’s beguiling, Arcadian-flavoured 2011 Second Language Music album, I Lived In Trees, recorded in collaboration with The A. Lords – musicians from a more recent generation of psychedelic-folk experimenters – proved a major critical hit.

All of which brings us to Mark Fry’s latest, most exquisitely realised musical offering to date, South Wind, Clear Sky. 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.

This is the official album launch for South Wind, Clear Sky in one of London’s most beautiful, intimate churches, St. Mary the Virgin (a stone’s throw away from Rotherhithe Overground station).

Support comes from Hastings-based polymath, Oliver Cherer (aka Dollboy) whose recent collection of sweet and tender recordings, 'Sir Ollife Leigh & Other Ghosts' (also released on Second Language and championed by the likes of BBC 6 Music’s Gideon Coe and Lauren Laverne) sits somewhere between Robert Wyatt, North Sea Radio Orchestra and Alexander Tucker.

www.secondlanguagemusic.com

http://www.stmaryrotherhithe.org/