More precisely designed than previous work, the new record is as immediate and communicative as ever.   

Before search engines, there was the Whole Earth Catalog:an encyclopedia of counterculture designed to help people find and use stuff for sustainable living, like mountain bikes and water butts. Invitingly subtitled ‘access to tools,’ it was the emblem of a ’60s movement which was full of optimism about technology. And characterised by a lack of anxiety about what technology might mean for humankind’s place in the world: the Whole Earth Catalog’s founder, Steve Brand, wrote in the first edition: “we are as gods and might as well get good at it”. Equipping yourself for self-sufficiency, via this immense directory, could be a kind of spiritual or philosophical act.  

Dan Parr’s DIY antifolk project, the object of cultish hype among the quainter parts of the South London scene, is as eclectically sprawling as its namesake. The seventeen-album archive is encyclopaedic in its scope, from the minimal, writerly folk of [deep breath] ‘Dear Supreme Leader and Principle Object of Faith, This Would Be The Time To Answer The Prayers of the Lost and Doubtful’(2010)to last year’s suave and richly jazz-laden ‘Do You Face The Brutal Reality?’Bearing out the OG Catalog’s outsider maximalism, The Last Whole Earth Catalog offers consistently high-concept output, concerned with big picture questions about existence and society. But Dan also has a David Sedaris-esque knack for exposing the absurd in everyday life: I’m thinking of the titling of a 2020 record, ‘Single Use Stress Balls’ (one of three albums TLWEC released that year).  

‘We’re All Down The Rabbit Hole’ is the latest incarnation of the Whole Earth way of thinking. It’s seriously class emo-fringed outcast folk, ridden with the anxieties of trying to make ethical decisions in a megacorp world, and of the unavoidable ‘everythingness’ of the digital age.  ‘If Only,’ the alternative country track which certifies Dan’s songwriting genius, documents the paralysis induced by digital-era information overload: “Do we know too much? … I don’t know how to help; I don’t know how to change anything”. In light of this commentary, the “rabbit hole” of the title comes back into focus with new meaning: endless internet detours into endless depressing news items. Stitched through with all the sad-fiddle suffering of a Songs: Ohiarecord, it is interspersed with math rock breaks that make me feel like I am angrily skateboarding around a cul-de-sac in the midwest. The other big track on this album, ‘Have You Ever’, stands out for its paranoid, Johnny Greenwood-esque riff and its trollishly proggy outro.  

Dan’s gift is to produce songs that are the perfect combination of familiar and unexpected, and ‘We’re All Down The Rabbit Hole’ nails that (albeit with a few more ‘it grows on you’ tracks than the all-killer records ‘Do You Face the Brutal Reality’ and ‘There It Isn’t’). ‘Look At Me’ kicks in as catchy and twee as the most easygoing Alex G rep, but wraps with a devilish electric guitar canon that leaves you squirming. Glitch elements in ‘Until I’m Clear’ and ‘Reread My Life’ are a genius hack to unsettle intuitive songwriting into something slightly sly and untrustworthy. This foray out of TLWEC’s usual lo-fi services an underpinning narrative framework about joining a cult, following someone who starts off with big ideas about life and society, but loses track of themselves as they’re drawn into this underworld. 

Even with that move away from the lo-fi, TLWECis still a project with a hardcore commitment to DIY, in that Dan records and produces the whole thing himself, down to the egg shaker. In that sense, it’s a true child of the Whole Earth Catalog, the musical equivalent of, like, building a wilderness home using stuff you’ve bought via mail order. The TLWEC method is also interested in capturing a real musical moment, rather than perfecting a track by recording endless takes: the ‘write quickly, record quickly’ impulse has generated a library of highly communicative, almost unmediated material. ‘We’re All Down The Rabbit Hole’feels, with its glitch moments and its narrative structure, more precisely designed, but it still offers some of the most immediate artist-listener encounters that I can remember.