Alex Jiawei Chen

Music

Blind Joe Death

Fahey recorded this in 1959, pressed a hundred copies, and put a fictional bluesman’s name on half of them.

The playing is fingerstyle guitar in open tunings, structurally closer to Bartok than to the Delta blues it borrows its vocabulary from. Pieces do not resolve so much as circle and stop. On first listen it sounds like someone practicing; on the fourth you notice the practicing is the composition.