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Faun Fables.
When Dawn McCarthy was a little girl her brother would call her Dawn the Fawn. One day she decided to change her nickname to Dawn the Faun, for the implications of the new spelling suited what she felt akin to - something relating to the woods, simple revelry of the senses, hairy half-goat men. Residing in California, it's fitting that she should live in a rustic cabin heated by two wood stoves, the many windows revealing canopied yards full of fruit trees and vines. It's "a great marriage of city and country living," she declares.
McCarthy first issued the name Faun Fables for a set of her illustrated comics. She has since made three records under that moniker, the latest of which, 'Family Album', was released via Drag City this year. McCarthy and long-time musical collaborator and fellow multi-instrumentalist Nils Frykdahl will bring Faun Fables to Australia and New Zealand for the first time.
"Only recently did I find something that I felt coined what I'm basically drawn towards, and that was 'underworld tradition': the study of folklore with an emphasis on the planet as being a living, animate thing, full of all kinds of creatures and places... Certain stories and themes have been mysteriously repeated again and again, in different cultures and different time periods. It's possibly the oldest kind of lore, it's not even a religion, but it's what all religions include and draw upon. It's oral tradition, stories."
McCarthy's intoxication with folkloric traditions is evident in her music and artwork. She and Frykdahl play snaking acoustic guitars, eerie flutes and medieval hand drums, war-like, tinged with Gothic macabre and European earth folk. The record's sleeve is adorned with pink and grey hues, a mother with babes in arms, the gloomy sun setting on a desolate expanse. McCarthy's voice is utterly bewildering; one moment she swirls, Siren-like, the next she yodels, wails, screams like a teary-eyed gypsy. In contrast Frykdahl's booming Scott Walkeresque baritone paints him a cloaked magus, a grim heavy metal folk player. When their voices collide, it's as if by magic, taking little time to pull you into the rusty din. Much like the name Faun Fables would suggest, the theatrical vocals make each song its own fairytale; the idyllic flirts with the sinister, the light with the dark. The marriage of theatre and music is indeed central to the music of Faun Fables; "It's a natural place that music wants to go towards."
'Family Album' is "a nice, gangly portrait of what my creative world has been in recent times." Recorded almost solely at McCarthy's house over two months, it was a good excuse for her to spend time with - and cook for - the dozen family and friends that play on the record. Furthermore whales, crows and wolves, a wandering Italian man and his dog and a throng of Italian schoolchildren are in the details. "The final stages of the record were completed in absolute 'Picnic At Hanging Rock' intoxication. I guess we're going to do a show near Hanging Rock, and are taking a field trip there! I really feel that story is partially responsible for making this whole trip to Australia happen."
The mystery of that famous Australian film, the all-pervading air of dread in 'The Wicker Man,' and Third Ear Band's soundtrack to Polanski's 'Macbeth' can all be aligned with 'Family Album,' as can the dark esoteric folk and progressive music of Current 93, Comus, Arthur Brown and Graham Bond. If you can get past the record's eight-minute-long first song, with its howling and death-march drums, you will be rewarded with rich, bewitching songwriting. McCarthy plays the mother, the sister, the temptress and the sage.
Confessing her hyperactivity and her love of her semi-nomadic lifestyle, McCarthy has played at "High schools, community centres, foster care farms for troubled teens, backyards, hole in the wall bars, cafes, hippy clubs with couches, smoky nightclubs, the one joint in the middle of nowhere all the locals go to, beautiful theatres... The variety gets you to work different muscles and appeases my restlessness. You arrive with a certain amount of armour to put on, depending on the crowd, and you get ready to fight if need be. Your job is to tackle the crowd, and hopefully you all end up in a heap at the end, laughing and crying together."
Lenin Simos
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Faun Fables play the Jade Monkey on Thurs 18 Nov.
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