Judy Dyble is something of a folk legend because of her early time in Fairport Convention. She was born in 1949 and by 1969 she had been in three bands, the first of which was in her school days, the second of which was Fairport, and the third of which was Giles, Giles, Fripp, McDonald and Dyble – the forerunner of King Crimson.
Darkness To Light – The Recordings 2004 – 2006 is a re-mastered three CD set of three albums that Dyble made thirty-odd years later after a period of musical inactivity. The originals were Enchanted Gardens (2004) Spindle (2005) and The Whorl (2006). The albums have been unavailable on CD for many years. There are 37 tracks on this re-master and I’ve got about 400 words to give a flavour of them.
I’ll start by saying I’d not heard any of these albums previously – and I’ve had a great time listening to them.
From alpha to omega then…
The first track of CD 1 is ‘Summer Gathers’. As the title suggests (I assume there is deliberate reference to summer coming in) it is folk /folk-rock derived. The first half of the track has Dyble’s vocal against a paced beat and the occasional swirl of flute, the lyric includes a reference to a “troubadour in colours flying kites above a hillside”, “flying fingers playing on a thousand fiddles” and then the instrumentation takes over before Dyble finishes, nearly alone with “Through the music of the room to take you on your journey, we’ll wander home and smiling say goodnight” to conclude this mystical and insistent track.
The final track of CD 3 is ‘Shining (Dulcimer Mix)’. The beauty of a three CD remastered set is that you have time to give a glimpse of the creative process. CD’s two and three have nine tracks additional to the original albums where you hear, for example, demo or ambient mixes.
Having not recorded between 1970 and 2004, Dyble went on to complete a series of other albums before her death in 2020. Marc Swordfish, with whom she worked on the three Darkness To Light CDs writes on the sleeve notes of this remaster, “It wasn’t contrived what we did, or going with a formula, it was all quite naive, really, and trying things out – a new direction using electronics but keeping it organic. I’m glad what we did kickstarted her into doing other releases. She got her wings and flew”.
If you’re reading this on folking.com, you may well have heard of Dyble because of her Fairport Convention links. Ringo Starr is famed (amongst one or two other things) for his line, “[It was] a short, incredible period of my life. I had 22 years leading up to it, and it was all over eight years later.” There is a strong sense of Dyble’s folk music history in the intonation, phrasing and clarity of her vocal, but any listener should come to this CD set expecting something rather different than her Fairport background.
As I write this final paragraph, the track ‘Nimbus Thitherwood’ is playing – lovely title and seven minutes and forty-three seconds of genre-defying musical delight. For want of anything better, I’d call these albums prog-folk, maybe ambient-folk? The genre name, though, (“a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” etc), doesn’t really matter other than as a means of tempting you to give these albums a listen.
I’d suggest you be tempted.
Mike Wistow
Artist’s website: https://www.judydyble.co.uk
‘Night Of A Thousand Hours’ – official video with Andy Lewis:
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