Imperfiction

In 1984, a full fourteen years after his second album Little Eyes was scrubbed from ESP-Disk's release schedule, Ed Askew finally recorded its follow-up, Imperfiction. Self-released in a tiny cassette run, it wasn't until Drag City's vinyl-only obscuro imprint Galactic Zoo Disk reissued these nine songs in 2011 that most of Askew's latter-day fans got to finally hear them. Those expecting a Reagan-era updating of the compelling acid-folk of 1969's Ask The Unicorn may well be disappointed: according to Askew's brief liner notes, the album was recorded in a single session with two instruments (his trademark tiple, a resonant 10-string relative of the guitar, and a harpsichord built from a kit), one microphone and a cheap two-track cassette deck in his basement apartment in New Haven, Connecticut. The lo-fi recording set-up and casually imperfect performances suggest that Askew (who had recently quit performing live) was merely putting down his current batch of unrecorded songs before he forgot them. Some seem barely written -- the brief "Tom" is a single couplet repeated several times over a meandering chord progression -- and none reach the poetic intensity of Askew's best early songs, such as "Fancy That." That said, it's a charmingly rough set of tunes, at times reminiscent of then-contemporaries like Daniel Johnston and Bobb Trimble, and the best ones (most notably the lovely harpsichord exercise "Buddha Smiles") would have stood among Askew's finest given fuller and more precise recordings. Newcomers should definitely start with the two ESP-Disk records, though.