KAREN DALTON GREEN ROCKY ROAD (DELMORE) PYHA THE HAUNTED HOUSE (TUMULT)
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Two recent offerings on that unholy altar are among the best releases of the summer: Karen Dalton’s Green Rocky Road and Pyha’s The Haunted House. Both consist of music made in virtual isolation by brilliant eccentrics and then very nearly lost. Dalton was an almost-famous Greenwich Village folkie from the 60s whose musical legacy consists largely of ingratiating, bluesy guitar tracks on which she sings like an improbably docile Billie Holiday; the two albums she released in her lifetime, in ’69 and ’71, were both reissued in 2006. Green Rocky Road, a disc of recently unearthed home recordings from 1962 and ’63, mostly on banjo, is the only record of her earlier, starker musical persona—the live material reissued on last year’s Cotton Eyed Joe, though from roughly the same period, mostly sounds like the albums.
Pyha is even more obscure. A native of South Korea, he allegedly recorded The Haunted House, his first black-metal opus, by himself between the ages of 12 and 14, then began circulating it on CD-R in 2001. A copy brought back from Korea fell into the hands of the metal aficionados at the San Francisco label Tumult, who managed to track him down. The album had its much-belated formal release, with extra tracks from ’04 and ’05, in July.
Folk and metal—and the cold northern European cultures from which they arose—share a fascination with death that informs their notions about authenticity and art. In punk, realness tends to mean rawness and directness; in jazz and hip-hop it means invention and elan; in blues and gospel it’s emotional depth. The music is about the performer’s skill and charisma, and so about life. In folk and metal, on the other hand, the demands of the form tend to obliterate personality. You become authentic by being hollowed out.
