(Rock, Folk, Experimental) [CD] Michael Chapman - The Resurrection & Revenge of the Clayton Peacock - 2012, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

01. The Resurrection of Clayton Peacock 21:26
02. The Revenge of Clayton Peacock 17:20
All music composed by Michael Chapman

Originally released as a limited-edition LP (500 copies numbered in silver ink).
The design of the inner sleeve can be described as "Roll over, Malevich, and tell Kandinsky the news."

Since emerging from the folk scene in Yorkshire, England in 1967, guitarist, and singer Michael Chapman has gained a dual reputation as one of England’s finest original singer/songwriters and most restless guitar players, equally comfortable in folk, rock, free improvisation, global music styles, blues, and jazz. With over 40 albums to his credit, this former art and photography teacher has, in the 21st century, been embraced by a host of boundary-crossing younger musicians who credit his influence on their work including Thurston Moore, Steve Gunn, Ryley Walker, Meg Baird, and many more. No two albums in his catalog are alike, and, over different decades, certain recordings from his shelf have alternated as influential, beginning with his 1969 fingerpicking Brit folk classic Rainmaker and his 1970 singer/songwriter masterpiece Fully Qualified Survivor (featuring Mick Ronson on lead guitar). Later recordings, including 1976’s rock & roll outing Savage Amusement, his proto-new age 1987 offering Heartbeat, and his instrumental forays in the 21st century including the “guitar travelscapes” of Americana and Words Fail Me, as well as Pachyderm and The Resurrection and Revenge of the Clayton Peacock, showcase the full range of his playing, composing, and improvising styles.
Chapman attended art school in Leeds. After graduating, he worked as an art and photography teacher in Lancashire. Playing guitar form his teens on, he developed a style that wove jazz, folk, blues, and ragtime, and his repertoire at the time time was primarily comprised of jazz guitar standards. In the middle of the ’60s he began listening to the new wave of British folk revivalists such as Ralph McTell, Bert Jansch, Davy Graham, and John Renbourn. By adapting what he already knew to what he was learning, Chapman developed a distinctive playing style that incorporated all of his chosen styles as well as East Indian modalism.
He first appeared on the London and Cornwall folk music circuits in 1967, including at the Piper’s Folk Club in Penzance on a bill with John Martyn and Roy Harper. His incendiary live perfomances resonated not only with club audiences but also with A&R men. He accepted a contract offer from Harvest (EMI’s “underground” boutique label) that led to the release of his debut long-player Rainmaker in 1969. The album featured the support of Rick Kemp (who played bass with Chapman for many years) and Danny Thompson. Window followed in short order, with Fully Qualified Survivor completing a debut triptych that sent waves of critical appreciation through the music industry—influential BBC disc jockey John Peel supported Chapman whenever possible. Sales, however, did not match the critical acclaim for Chapman’s work, leaving Fully Qualified Survivor as a high point, with “Postcards of Scarborough” generally being the one cut most often remembered when Chapman is discussed.
After the release of Wrecked Again, Chapman parted company with Harvest, choosing to sign to Decca’s Deram subsidiary, where he altered course somewhat, adding electric guitar and harder rhythms to his work. The first result, Millstone Grit, offered Chapman’s trademark gloomy writing mixed with a couple of lively instrumentals, some almost experimental, and the country-styled “Expressway in the Rain.” Deal Gone Down, and the live Pleasures of the Street followed. Don Nix produced Savage Amusement, which reworked a couple of earlier songs; the album’s title would be used in the mid-’80s for a band featuring Chapman and Kemp.
Chapman’s Decca deal ended in 1977, and he began an association with Criminal Records the following year; both labels released versions of The Man Who Hated Mornings. Chapman then turned his hand to the release of a guitar instruction record entitled Playing Guitar the Easy Way in 1978. He continued to gig and record consistently, varying styles and sounds, sometimes working with a full group but more often working with Kemp alone. After the release of Heartbeat in 1987, Chapman experimented with self-released albums, and as of the 1997 release of Dreaming Out Loud, he was issuing albums at the rate of one every two years, continuing to attract high praise, if not great sales.
His prolific release schedule continued unabated in the 21st century with both song-based and instrumental albums, as well as numerous reissues of his catalog by various labels. The first notable entry in the new millennium was the instrumental offering Americana in 2000, which showcased Chapman’s fascination with, and mastery of, Southern blues, folk, and ragtime jazz styles. It was followed by a second collection—this one with masterful slide entries as well—entitled Americana II in 2002. A self-released album, 2005’s Plaindealer featured the guitarist playing solo or in small groups, performing original songs and folk standards. It was later reissued by Honest Jon’s.
Chapman toured with the No-Neck Blues Band and Jack Rose in 2006. Drenched in acid folk and free improvisation, he returned to England inspired and recorded the double-disc Words Fail Me, recorded completely solo on acoustic and electric guitars. He ripped through utterly rearranged older songs as well as brave new compositions in a 100-minute, live-in-the-studio performance with no overdubs. On 2007’s The Wedding Band, Chapman returned to all-electric guitar; it was his first digitally recorded release, while 2008’s Sweet Powder was drenched in sounds that reflected the blues, folk, and modern country music the guitarist loved, from R.L. Burnside to Steve Eagles to Neil Young and more. On 2010’s ambitious Wry Tree Drift, named after an old mine near his farm, he played both electric and acoustic guitars, performing folk ballads, languid instrumental dubs, dark electric blues, and solo guitar workouts.
In 2011, Chapman released the instrumental double set Train Song: Guitar Compositions, 1967-2010, which featured all newly recorded material. Later in the year, the guitarist issued his most expansive and controversial album, The Resurrection and Revenge of the Clayton Peacock (titled after a track on John Fahey’s 1965 offering The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death). It featured two side-long improvisations involving drones, delay, and loop effects. It was issued by Blast First Petite as the first part of a trilogy. Its second part, Pachyderm, was released in 2012, followed by The Polar Bear in 2014; Blast First Petite announced plans to reissue the trilogy as a special box set. Also in 2012, a tribute album entitled Oh Michael, Look What You’ve Done: Friends Play Michael Chapman was released by Tompkins Square and featured performances from Hiss Golden Messenger, Meg Baird, Black Twig Piers, Maddy Prior, and more. In 2015, Chapman returned with a new album of guitar pieces, Fish. January 2017 saw the release of 50, his debut for Paradise of Bachelors, which found Chapman embracing past and present, with guest artists including celebrated British folksinger Bridget St. John and gifted indie rock guitarist Steve Gunn. The following year, Blast First Petite issued Live VPRO 71. Recorded by Dutch underground radio station VPRO on May 6 of 1971, it was the earliest known live recording of Chapman’s—some two years after Fully Qualified Survivor, his debut for Harvest. Accompanied on the date by bassist Rick Kemp, the audio disc contained a healthy selection of tunes from the show, but the release was also accompanied by a download card that contained video of the entire concert. Later in 2017 he issued the duet offering EB=MC2 with Israeli guitarist Ehud Banai. While Chapman basically lived on the road for most of 2018, he was able to enter Mwnci Studios in rural West Wales with a host of friends including Bridget St. John, cellist Sarah Smout, pedal steel legend BJ Cole, and guitarist/producer Steve Gunn. The finished album was titled True North and released by Paradise of Bachelors in February 2019. (Steven McDonald, AllMusic)

It was at a Jack Rose tribute gig in Philadelphia that the idea for this album was first mooted—Ecstatic Peace! approached Chapman backstage and asked if he would record a limited print run improvised album for them. He agreed, and The Resurrection and Revenge of the Clayton Peacock is the result—two tracks, a running time of 38 minutes, and a sonic adventure that comes from the far side of the experimental guitar underground.
The Resurrection and Revenge of the Clayton Peacock (a reference to the track “The Death of the Clayton Peacock” on John Fahey’s The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death) is, unbelievably, Chapman’s first improv album to which the legitimate response seems to be, “where has this come from?” Chapman’s life and work, despite its scope of influence and its always oddly marginalised status, has been undergoing something of a critical reappraisal of late with the re-releases of some of his classic early albums and vocal support from underground figures such as the aforementioned and now deceased Jack Rose, Tom Carter and Thurston Moore; but still, none of that really prepares you for such a strange and other sounding album.
Inevitably when confronted with a rupture of this nature, there’s an impulse towards investigation and speculation: to determine a piece’s provenance or examine the motivation behind the creation; to go looking in the artist’s catalogue for clues, or even delving into referenced source material—in this case the suppressed howl of the referenced Fahey original. Chapman’s work to date has covered a range of styles, but in the main he’s tended to concentrate on limpid finger-picked ragtime-inflected traditionals and originals, and more straight ahead folk rock and all-out rock. You might advance a theory that this improv space is the sound of the interstices between these forms, or is something like the sonic outfall of precisely these years of working with form.
And the two tracks that make up. . . Peacock are all about this notion of an improv space, creating a cavernous theatre into which Chapman threads tendrils of piped silver, or pours billowing contrails of feedback, the latter stages of which indelibly mark themselves out as bird calls, bird shrieks. All the while the inner ear searches for purchase, for familiar Chapman tropes and landmarks. And the truth is, they simply aren’t there. What you’re left with is a feeling that you’ve borne witness to a rite, an invocation. The assumption is that Chapman must have been experimenting privately with this kind of sound for a number of years, or in the very least had been comfortable with the very idea of improvising in such a minimal yet abandoned fashion—the recourse to singing bowls and mbira in the second track (the “Revenge”) were presumably results of previous experiments. Listening to this in the dead of night, I had intimations of the occult, of a kind of spectral channelling—of what I’m not sure. But wilder flights led me to wonder if this was a comment on the end of things, the wasteland at the end of the tradition, or maybe the primal mulch from which it grew. It also felt as if it might be a glimpse into a musician’s fount or sacred space, the aural equivalent of peripheral vision, glimpses of sounds that may have drifted around Chapman for years, waiting exactly for this moment of channelling.
There’s an aside to all this and it’s around the usual rhetoric of age and creativity. Chapman has released upwards of 35 albums since his debut in 1969, which is a remarkable figure in itself; but to have suddenly found this new direction so late in the day, and to have inhabited it with such dexterity and force gives the game a whole different arc. If it wasn’t already so explicitly linked to Fahey you’d wonder if that most haunted and most haunting of figures had found some way of re-incarnating his damn(ed) self. The Resurrection and Revenge of the Clayton Peacock is an astounding bell peal, you should seek it out, now. (The Liminal)
Even if you’re familiar with the Yorkshire-born composer, singer, guitarist and self-confessed maverick troubadour Michael Chapman, this recording comes as something of a shock. The music here is unlike anything he has crafted before—he casts adrift his skills as a songwriter and focuses on improvisation. Listen to Chapman’s recently reissued Fully Qualified Survivor, one of the key documents of his work in the 1970s underground, and you get a sense of just how different this record is. Originally released on Harvest, Survivor was instrumental in making Chapman’s voice accessible to a larger audience—John Peel championed his song “Postcards Of Scarborough” on his Top Gear radio show, and named Chapman as one of his favourite solo performers. Chapman’s style was personal and straightforward, where he could sing a melancholic song or unravel a soul-tugging instrumental without smothering it with false sentiment. But Survivor also adventurously incorporated string arrangements, glam rock guitar, congas, sound effects and fingerpicked acoustic guitar mantras into the mix, confounding any supposed notion that he belonged to the established British folk tradition—or any tradition for that matter. The Resurrection and Revenge of the Clayton Peacock moves out even further. The seed for this new direction germinated in Philadelphia last year, at a tribute concert for his late friend and fellow guitarist Jack Rose, where Chapman was appearing. After his set he was approached backstage by Ecstatic Peace! and asked if he had entertained the notion of recording an album of improvised guitar. Chapman accepted the challenge. While contemporary players as Bert Jansch, Davy Graham, Harvest labelmate Roy Harper and John Martyn have all taken their music beyond the limitations of formal song structure to some degree, Chapman plunges straight into the deep end with an album’s worth of improvised music.
The title is a reverential nod to John Fahey’s instrumental “The Death of the Clayton Peacock” which appeared on his 1965 album The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death, and the album carries a finely detailed engraving of a male peacock and his mate pasted on the front cover and a Posada woodcut of Death holding a guitar on the back. It might be assumed that the two side-length pieces are in the spirit of Fahey’s later “industrial” work, or perhaps a salute to the tapping that Rose would summon from his guitar as if making contact with the Delta dead. But whatever the inspiration, the sounds and styles here are solely of Chapman’s own invention. The resurrection opens with a lowing feedback howl from his electric guitar that intensifies in pitch until it reaches an anguished scream. Beneath this he layers echoing pulsations, string manipulation and rhythmic neck-knocking as he probes every facet of his instrument to tease out a fresh sound or effect. It’s light years away from his usual working methods, and the feeling comes across that Chapman is as surprised (and delighted) as the listener to hear the waves of energy he lets loose from his instrument. As the feedback flurries subside Chapman sinks into a dark blues meditation, a cavernous sequence of bowed, strummed and plucked reverberations, sparsely illuminated by flickering trails of cosmic fingerpicking.
The spell is broken—or enhanced—with the intrusion of an overdubbed beat that cruises by at the end of the piece, which sounds something like the neighbours have inadvertently turned up their bass heavy sound system. The resulting blur of improvisational guitar playing and something akin to primitive dubstep mesh together for a near perfect landing.
Skeletal guitar remains the dominant instrument on the record’s second side, but other instruments float over and under it in the mix. This is improvisation across a whole range of instruments, with Chapman moving out from behind the guitar to play with a whole palette of timbres—gamelan singing bowls, an African thumb piano and more percussion—a sonic attempt to replicate the luxuriant tail of the peacock, perhaps? Beginning with a slowly escalating metallic drone and singing bowl, the mood becomes more ethereal than the desolate darkness that haunted the first side, with Chapman playing his acoustic guitar like a zither—pecking, rather than plucking, at the strings as the tinkling of the bowls chimes behind him. After a brief, somewhat disjointed, thumb piano solo, Chapman returns to his electric guitar, still accompanied by the ringing orchestra of bowls, but with the addition of a steadily pounding hand drum. As on the first side, drum and guitar flow formlessly into each other and become as one. Chapman’s interpretation of the peacock’s revenge is not quite as dramatic or involved as its resurrection, but the iridescence of the playing that shimmers through both these pieces is dazzling. (The Wire)
http://www.blastfirstpetite.com/michael-chapman.html
See also http://www.michaelchapman.co.uk/cd.htm#peacock

Michael Chapman: guitars, loops, percussion
Produced by Michael Chapman