Dorothy Carter - Waillee Waillee

Packaged with a booklet, and housed in a beautiful silver tip-on jacket.

The intention was to feature this on release late last year, but the few copies we were allocated were snapped up before we had a chance. The enthusiasm was well directed. Born in New York in 1935, Dorothy Carter proved herself an intrepid and adventuring musician, travelling across several continents in pursuit of new understandings - monestaries in Mexico; conservatories in France and the UK; the founding of the CMPMC. Her principle instruments were the dulcimer and zither, and her work was broadly aligned with the new age & minimalist movement (an association she also shared with her husband, Robert Rutman). Waillee Waillee, her second record first released in 1978. evades any such easy classification, a moving expression of avant garde composition that sits in no one particular tradition. Indeed, such is the ground it covers, on first listen I thought it an archival compilation surverying Carter's catalogue. The ambition and vision proves startling, folding drone, Deuter minimalism, eastern ragas and folk into a rhapsodic, luminous whole. The obvious spiritual inclinations encourage thoughts of Laaraji and Alice Coltrane, and the centrality of the swirling zither is possessed of the same transcendtal qualities of that of Michael O'Shea, albeit it in a more formal context. Still, it's that engagement with folk song that feels especially stand out, Carter's singing on the title track a classic contribution to the canon, simultaneously forlorn and ascending. Closer 'Tree of Life' is perhaps the ultimate high point, a billowing, elegiac ballad that's a heavy as that one lonely cloud in the sky, like Virginia Astley on a sunbeam to heaven. The wonder of the wondrous!