Fountain Fire

Description

*Fountain Fire* is Bill MacKay's second solo album for Drag City. The Chicago guitarist's continuing musical journey is an internal conversation that follows a path on a worn map of his own making, through familiar nooks and unknown places, catalyzing a style as enamored of traditional music as it is of the avant-garde, and resulting in his most expansive and powerful album to date. It can be heard from the opening track, as the lava and lakes of "Pre-California" simmer before boiling, Bill assembles a bridge of guitars that layers rumbling acoustic beams, distorted electric structures, and sliding arches. Boldly leaping from fixed points, he makes synergistic discoveries in the open air. MacKay's songwriting style is at its most evolved, following serpentine trajectories within patterns, making tonal back-and-forths with instinctive flair and a stoic sense of the inevitable, forging a sound mosaic that breathes and grows organically to fill the space of the track. However, there is much more than technical prowess and captivating harmonic mastery. Bill MacKay's pieces are impressionistic cinematic miniatures inspired as much by his passion for cinema as for literature. As the musical pieces shift focus in a hallucinatory movement, Bill adds a new element to the mix: a pair of sung songs, both austere and emotionally charged to the point of giving goosebumps. Alongside the constantly changing instrumental flow of *Fountain Fire*, these sung moments shine with a blinding brilliance, like a mirage in the desert. The fire in the album's title marks a continuity in Bill's life; his genealogy, his history, his astrology, the burning effect of the overexposed slide of the title "Arcadia." It is also a seal to mark the chaos that surrounds us.