A recent 'featured artist' on Stuart Maconie's BBC 6Music Freakzone radio show, Mark Fry is best known for his 1972 psyche-folk classic 'Dreaming of Alice', a record that became a noughties underground cause célèbre thanks to name-checks by the likes of Jim O'Rourke and Fourtet's Kieran Hebden. Long settled in Normandy and enjoying a successful career as a painter, interest in his musical juvenilia came as a great surprise to Mark, who nonetheless relished the renewed interest enough to start recording again - a guitar having always been propped up against his painting studio wall. A 'getting-back-on-the-horse' new album, 'Shooting the Moon', duly appeared in 2008, after which Fry was courted by two young Dorset idyll-summoners: Mike Tanner (a.k.a. Plinth and a member of United Bible Studies, among myriad other arcane, leftfield outlets) and Nick Palmer (who records as Directorsound). The multi-instrumentalist pair, having christened themselves The A. Lords, quickly set about furnishing Mark with some timelessly hazy, art-folk musical backings over which the thoroughly rejuvenated singer-songwriter could unfurl his dream-like lyrics and gorgeously meandering vocal melodies. The result is 'I Lived in Trees': a gloriously drowsy, bucolic folk vision, pulled into Technicolor focus by Lemon Jelly's Nick Franglen at the mixing desk, and etched with The A. Lords classical guitars, Mellotrons and deft chamber arrangements - all of it in service of Mark Fry's magically timeless lyrical reveries. It is, effectively, 'Dreaming of Alice's true follow-up, a mere 39 years down the track.
"The Mark Fry album is brand new, though sounds rather compellingly as if it was recorded in 1971
01 I Lived In Trees 02 Behold The Nereids Under The Green Sea 03 Chalky Down 04 We All Fall Down 05 All Day Long 06 La Lune 07 Ruins Of Stone 08 Even The Sky 09 Taking Wing