In his book The People's Music (Pimlico, 2003), Ian MacDonald calls John Fahey the "Minstrel of the Mysterious". Guitarist Fahey was certainly unique, a creative force who spent most of his musical 'career' in a seemingly endless, and timeless, meditation on the primitive folk process: deconstructing the sounds and techniques of early country blues and synthesising them into his very own distinctive guitar style (complete with very audible string slides, hammer-ons, chokes and pull-offs). Whether he was 'mysterious' reduces down to how esoteric his music seems in comparison to that of the early blues giants. A sometimes unschooled, illiterate, black American musician of the 1920s creating, unaided, a brand new music of great chordal and harmonic complexity seems far more mysterious to this writer than Fahey ever will (and I suspect he would have agreed). What's certain is John Fahey's music touched people emotionally with its raw beauty and lack of commercial compromise. MacDonald refers to Knott's Berry Farm Molly as "a sonic Blair Witch Project" and it's this sense of an 'outsider', plumbing the emotional depths of the psyche, which creates this 'skewed' aural perception.