Listening tonight to Tim Buckley's timeless Lorca, an album that literally rocked me back on my heels when I first heard it almost 30 years ago. It is a record of two halves, side one showcasing a wild new artistic tangent of Buckley's, at once raw and primitive , and side two seamlessly extending the musical development that began with Happy/Sad and eased into Blue Afternoon.
Side one still surprises and I distinctly recall the difficulty I had with this music when I first heard it. Many people consider Starsailor as Buckley's most difficult album but my first listen to Lorca's title track and Anonymous Proposition was a far more unsettling affair. There is a primitivism in Buckley's response to traditional folk musics here that is comparable to Captain Beefheart's assimilation of early blues on his masterpieces, Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off Baby. This was strange, restless, unsettling music to my ears, wildly different to Buckley's earlier music, infused by a primal urgency that saw the man actively responding in the moment not only to the imagistic lyrics but also to the improvisational sounds that his musicians were making. Poets utilise vocables whereby words are weighted not just by their meanings but also by their sounds and there is a similar concept at work here where Buckley trembles, shrieks, wails and hollers to shimmering, dizzying effect producing a sonic picture that intuitively completes our understanding of the elliptical lyrics.
This is brave, intensely original music, posessed of a a breathless urgency and given creative voice by a man whose restless interest in modern classical music and avant-garde jazz liberated him from a musical cul-de-sac of the backbeat and provoked him into producing something as furiously original as Lorca, a record that seethes with an unquenchable maverick vision which remains undimmed by time.

Gryphon Diablo 300, dCS Rossini (with matching clock), Kharma Exquisite Mini, Ansuz C2, Finite Elemente Master Reference.