Unlikely limited edition grey-area reissue of this legendary LP, one of the oddest and most talismanic releases to come out on John Fahey’s Takoma imprint. The late Charles Martin Simon, better known to the world as Charlie Nothing, was an American original, an artistic polymath, an instrument inventor, an author, a wild man, a drop out,  a farmer and, later, a reformed chronicler of the excess and underbelly of counter-cultural USA. Simon christened himself Nothing after the death of his wife to symbolize the psychological fragmentation that it brought on. Across the span of the late 20^th century he privately issued a bunch of books that dealt with everything from dietary advice through goofy autobiography. Besides his Takoma LP he is best known for his guitar sculptures made out of old automobile parts, inventions that he described as ‘Dingulators’. The Psychedelic Saxophone… was recorded in 1967 and released by John Fahey in a fabulous monochrome DIY psych sleeve, reproduced here as a paste-on. The album is all solo saxophone improvisations by Nothing, accompanied by minimal gong, conga, percussion and banjo ukulele. Nothing’s instrumental style walks the primitive/tutored line with alla the gutbucket aplomb of Don Van Vliet and the lucid melodicism of Eric Dolphy. There’s a distance to the recording, a quality of eerie space and a melancholy half-light that is extremely seductive. The gong sounds in the background almost all the way through, generating a subtle, uneasy drone that moves from the sound of distant electronic generators through crashing metallic waves. Nothing plays fast, raga-styled lines with a round, airy tone, never screaming or splitting multi-phonics like Brotzmann et al, but just as out, with duck calls reversing into repeating reed-tones that inhabit a similar psychological space to Terry Riley’s reed work. In a way it does exactly what is says on the sleeve, a saxophone album that ties up free jazz and counter-cultural modes with Ur-drones, massively-outside soloing and an atmosphere that is as damaged and cultic as anything from Amon Düül. It’s testament to just how advanced and open-minded Fahey’s aesthetic was that he could see the common ground that lay between Nothing and himself (the kinda vision that would eventually lead to his hook-up with The No-Neck Blues Band) and this is a classic document of solitary American genius that ranks up there with Braxton’s For Alto, Donald Miller’s A Little Treatise On Morals and Jack Rose’s Kensington Blues. Highly recommended.