Mirry – Mirry
Dutchess Records – Out Now
The notion of the outsider artist is both romantic and problematic. It’s easy, and often alluring, to fetishise naivety but this often devalues the hard work and the genuine artistry behind many creative practices. In reality, most of the musical artists we call outsiders – from Connie Converse to Jandek to Daniel Johnston – chose their path having had at least some small prior knowledge of the music industry.
The case of Mirabel Lomer is a little different. Born in 1906 into a strict family for whom the very idea of music was apparently distasteful, she spent the majority of her adult life as a full-time carer. Even at the time of her death in the 1980s, nothing was known about her creative life. But thirty years ago Mirabel’s great-nephew, Tom Fraser, rescued an old Transco record while clearing his grandfather’s house. It took him until the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic to get round to playing it, but when he did he discovered that his great aunt Mirry had been a keen composer of piano music. Her pieces were beautiful, haunting, nostalgic – a veritable treasure trove of music from the unique perspective of a woman working in secret, who perhaps never thought that her work would be appreciated – or even heard – by anyone outside her immediate circle. Now, with this release, we can hear this intriguing document, which is essentially free of the baggage of musical history.
Except it’s not quite that simple. Tom Fraser is a professional musician, and with the help of his brother-in-law (former Verve guitarist Simon Tong) he has created an album of new music that is based entirely – and, it seems, faithfully – on Mirry’s compositions. So what we are hearing here is effectively two things at once: the original artistic vision of the composer and the new vision of the musician-producers.
Thankfully both are strong enough for the project to work. Tong and Fraser’s technical skills are such that their involvement is noticeable without ever being obtrusive. The hiss and crackle and warp that underscores the simple piano melody of opener Anthem gives it a decayed, bittersweet air, and it is instantly apparent that Mirry was a natural composer with an ear for an unusual melody and an uncanny sense of timing. Idyll is more declamatory – the warm synths of its opening and the birdsong that runs through it sound like harbingers of summer. Like much of the album it is simple, joyous, but streaked with a certain melancholy that is hard to pin down.
The album skirts the edges of hauntology – there is the definite sense of a lost arcadia, a nostalgia for a past that never existed, or perhaps only existed in Mirry’s own almost hermetic world. As standalone pieces, these tunes are not hauntological, but Fraser and Tong’s settings make them so. They now hint at possible lost futures as well as pasts. The very existence of these pieces – and specifically the fortuitous nature of their preservation – brings up the possibility that there are numerous other such treasures. Some of these are still waiting to be found but others may have long been destroyed.
These compositions have a kind of double life as, on one hand, documents of a very specific social history and on the other something more nebulous and dreamlike. It’s as if they were haunting themselves. Study In B Flat Minor is a Satie-like etude fighting to be heard amongst the carefully curated warp and warble of its own sound-world, and when the final melodic flourish emerges it produces a feeling similar to the quiet exhilaration of unexpectedly remembering a detail from a dream. There are interruptions, backtracks, moments of near silence and unexpected about-turns, such as the one in the middle of Carragh Lake, where the lapping, ebbing progression of the first half gives way to something much stranger, a spiritual experience superseding a physical one.
Then there is the beautiful, meandering Study In F, where muted flourishes of piano escape like puffs of air before a series of short percussive sections drag the piece from past to present, from the meadow to the club. It’s the most audacious step on the album, but it works, mainly because the two different worlds that the music seems to describe may not be that different after all: both are concerned with rapture and sensual experience.
Often, as on Reverie, the music seems to be coming from a different room, or rather it’s as if you are listening to it slightly out of step with time. Credit must be given to Tong and Fraser for managing this effect without it wearing thin or becoming an obvious ploy to tap into the deep seam of nostalgia that is always just below the surface. The most striking example is on Anthem Reprise where the original composition is subjected to some serious disfigurement, the result sounding like the most heat-buckled vinyl imaginable. It then gives way to the album’s only vocal passage, presumably Mirry’s own truncated performance, in which she implodes into a disarming fit of the giggles. The effect of a human voice at this point in the record is to draw the whole thing together, to anchor it in a recognisable period of history. It is as if Tong and Fraser are saying that, despite all the input they have had, this remains Mirry’s work, the work of a strong and unusual personality, a woman whose unique talent should now finally be given its due.
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