Grain

“It’s a love affair with the blues: a strange brew of landscape, found-sound, church-house moan, noise, grit and efflorescence.” 

Michael Farley is the real deal. His life and his art are one. From playing sax on the road for years with R&B bands, working with experimental pioneer Kenneth Gaburo, to becoming a professor at the edge of New York state, his genuine, singular, gentle, curious soulfulness follows wherever he goes. It is the music of late-night post-gig drives when your mind is dreamily trying to make sense of your life. 

His relatively few compositions are rare treasures of where his mind and body have traveled, connecting reflections of place that are as musically unconventional as the spirit they convey. Tape, analog electronics, sax, and voice are the methods; love and tenderness abound even in the harshest noise. 

Michael Farley’s saxophone, his voice, his film work push and probe into the GRAIN of every image, every sound. Add Barbara Phillips-Farley’s warm pianistic embrace of each note, Guy Berard’s surreal cover images and Robert Motherwell’s brush grazing ink across rice paper. It’s a rich package for the eye, ear and heart. 

But the best moments occur in “No Eyes”, based upon David Meltzer’s book-length ode to Lester Young. Farley’s tenor and voice leads us toward 

“…stuff inside
folds into layers of more stuff 

veils float throughout
broken heart thoroughfare
ensembled & assembled into one
solo after another after all hours collapse
into one moment going after another”