The Fatal Englishman

The Fatal Englishman – ‘Ravenglass’
One of the more obscure and mysterious releases in the Bandcamp cannon is the debut LP of solo recording project The Fatal Englishman. Somewhat lo-fi in sound – perhaps purposely rough – and relying mainly on disintegrating guitars and ambient-driven menace, ‘Ravenglass’ is a concentrated leftfield examination of the shady, lost, brief paths trodden by the ghosts of men. What emerges between layers of strange rhythms and found sounds is a Space Age carnivale, a grave comedy debased by alien graces, an out-there melange of worn-out dirges and the groaning ruckus of minimalist dazed incantations for lost voices. The whole thing is quite fog-eyed and bizarre, and at a running time of thirty minutes the man behind the moniker knows when to call it quits. Biographically, there is next to nothing about him online. The tendency to elaborate obsessively on simple forms and in often chaotic ways is a characteristic of much outsider art. As Deborah Solomon has written about the artist Joseph Cornell: “The objects inside his boxes were not just random assortments of material but souvenirs of a quest, a chronicle of infatuations whose meaning was as complicatedly inward as a private journal.” In his unsettling collection ‘Ravenglass’, The Fatal Englishman shares his eroded but ineluctable music. The result is a surreal sense of being let in on an unhinged rock ‘n’ roll pagan ceremony.

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