Low Tide Kevin Farge

• 1 Windswept 01:38
• 2 Mid-Day Turquoise 04:07
• 3 Pelican Song 02:47
• 4 A View of Waves from Underwater 02:07
• 5 New Sensations 01:48
• 6 Training Montage 01:36
• 7 Waves a Glimmer 01:59
• 8 Playing with My Father 02:12
• 9 The Mast 01:58
• 10 Too Much Ink 02:57
• 11 Cold Front 00:49
• 12 Seashell Song 02:13
• 13 Dry Grass 02:02
• 14 Jumping Rice Snacks 01:30
• Total Runtime 29:43

Info for Low Tide

Kevin Farge is a songwriter and visual artist who was born in Houston, Texas, and moved to his stepmother’s native Costa Rica at age eight, where he learned to speak Spanish and surf. The family eventually settled down back in Houston. Farge has spent the past several years living in the same small beach town in Costa Rica that he visited as a child. Low Tide, Kevin Farge’s first full-length album for Very Jazzed, showcases his unique melodic storytelling for solo guitar. Sounding more like the spare, alchemical songs by Six Organs of Admittance, the Jewelled Antler Collective, or Loren Connors, Farge charts a unique path through a solo guitar world otherwise dominated by guitarists imitating the style of John Fahey. Kevin Farge’s songs are not long, aimless American Primitive ragas. Rather, Farge’s guitar speaks, in an alarming variety of nuggety little gems that each get straight to the point, with time lengths more similar to Brazilian guitarists like Luiz Bonfá and João Gilberto. Taken as a whole, Low Tide collects things found along the beach at low tide – wind, pelicans, a mast, waves as seen from a variety of angles (above and below water), cold spray, dry grass, a bag of rice cakes. At turns haunting and forlorn, at others bright, tender and beautiful, the album feels grown, not constructed; like it has accumulated over time, sand piled high on the beach. All Kevin Farge had to do was go and pluck it from the reef at low tide.

Kevin Farge

Kevin Farge
I grew up on the Gulf Coast of Texas in the United States. With my visual art, I try to create a language of graphical figures that I can juxtapose to tell stories, taking inspiration from the untrained quality and mystic symbolism of abstract art and cave art. I’m interested in the origins of language in the mind and how visual art can bypass the language-forming portions of the mind. My goal with my visual art is to create aesthetic spaces that calm the mind, make people laugh, and reach to unknown places.

I studied conservation biology in graduate school, and my love of nature and time as a science teacher inform my work. I spent a lot of time diagraming cells. I find the goings on at this level of reality to be quasi-mystical, the separation between consciousness and matter, indistinct. It’s where the rubber meet the road for life. I sometimes find myself diagraming cells again in my artwork. Some visual artists whose works have inspired me include Cy Twombly, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, Henri Matisse, Mark Rothko, the Chauvet Cave artists, and Hayao Miyazaki.

With my music, I try to share a spirit of perseverance, grit, and humor. I just like a good melody and good lyrics. I’m inspired by the music of great pop songwriters who can make you cry with just a few notes, like Brian Wilson and Randy Newman. I love the music of Donovan, Nick Drake, Georges Moustaki, Moondog, Little Wings, and Devendra Banhart.

This album contains no booklet.