Dorothy Carter - Waillee, Waillee (1978)
Somewhere between avant-garde drone-y post-minimalism, acid-folk, ethereal neo-medieval and rough around the edges new age. Dorothy Carter, who didn't make a record until she was in her forties, is the queen of the hammered dulcimer. She was also keen and expert on the zither, hurdy gurdy, recorder, flute, psaltery and piano.
Enjoy the enchanted delights of a lost record that will never be reissued. Waillee, Waillee contains some of the most gorgeous dulcimer/zither this side of a Laaraji record. Sometimes the atmospheric all encompassing eternal reverberations become so sublime it's hard not to become overwhelmed. Glorious stuff...as in one of the best albums ever recorded.
Other contributors to this privately pressed LP are sound sculptor and instrument maker Rob Rutman. He plays the bow chime and steel cello. Gail Edwards is the percussionist who plays tamboura, slit drum, bells, shakers and er...harps.
*I don't really know if Dorothy Carter is a cult figure or not, maybe she's not considered cool who knows? There's not exactly an over abundance of information about her on the interwebs but we do know later in the 1990s she had an unlikely chartbusting collaboration with Miranda Sex Garden's Katharine Blake. They co-founded Mediæval Bæbes, a neo-classical ensemble, that had hit records and even went silver in the UK. Perhaps this kind of mainstream success has kept Waillee Waillee out of cult record status contention that other less commercially successful musicians like Vashti Bunyan, Linda Perhacs, Judee Sill etc. now have (bear in mind tastemakers are often clueless dickheads).
**The album in the above video finishes around the forty minute mark. The last six minutes are some kind of a mish mash of repeated bits for some reason.
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