What lies beyond 'The Black Door'?

An essence of otherness in the form of Cole Berliner, breezing out a vibrant acoustic sequence of bucolic instrumentals, chasing an old-world sense of beauty, projecting equally into the ear of listener and non-listener!

Listen, having lived life as an atheist-spiritualist and progressive pop composer/performer, Cole desired to find his own kind of devotional music, devoting himself to the cause that became this album. But it took more than that in the end.

'The Black Door' required playing in aspects of traditional genre formats like ‘country,' ‘blues,' ‘finger-style,' ‘gospel,' ‘soundtrack,' ‘ambient,' and Cole is adept at them all, mixing and matching modes and vibes. Adding to that a cosmic spray of full circle/circus leap consciousness, 'The Black Door' flew open!

Initially conceived as solo acoustic guitar tunes, in the studio the songs demanded the dynamics of an acoustic ensemble (a departure from his work with Kamikaze Palm Tree and Sharpie Smile). This was key. The arrangements form intricate passages for acoustic, electric and lap steel guitars, acoustic/electric bass, piano, drums, percussion, violin, viola, horns, woodwinds and synthesizers. Playing with Cole are violinist Laena Myers, along with Garret Lang, Dylan Hadley, Sofia Arreguin, Robert Earl Thomas, Michael Sachs, Sarah Safaie, Kilan Thorns and Cesar Hernandez PLUS Cesar Maria, who mixed and co-produced with Cole.

The music of 'The Black Door' is honest modern folk—west coast folk!—with a rad amount of odd psyche laced within. A presence in the production eco-system of ominous (but friendly) ghost theatre, elegant framing for a perfectly civilized, surreal mystery and exquisite, acoustic folk-chamber puzzle. And lo!

Cole Berliner's solo debut is rich-grained instrumental parlour music, organically growing on in the speakers and ears beyond, an album after our own hearts in the challenger tradition of Bert Jansch's 'Avocet', Marc Ribot's 'Saints' and Jim O'Rourke's 'Bad Timing'. As Cole brings a succession of new moods and qualities to the true spirit of the thing, 'The Black Door' opens up an album-length sequence of musical transformation.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Black Door
2. A Western Sun
3. Poppies
4. Bongo Syndicate
5. Bugle Call
6. Country Tea
7. Window Leans Left
8. The Light
9. Cathedral
10. Death of Stars

'Orange' is an unstill life, a bowlful of new White Fence concepts for guitar band, grown larger through thoughts, feelings/SONGS. Rock ‘n balladry play with genre in uncrowded space. 'Orange' is KILLER POP thru clean lines of power, outlined with an emphatic/unalterable (minimalist) frame. Dark magik at its most bright! A trance-like chronology of consciousness/SONGS captained by producer Ty Segall in opalescent diamond tightness and ice fidelity.

TRACK LISTING

1. That's Where The Money Goes (Seen From The Celestial Realm)
2. I Came Close, Orange For Luck
3. Your Eyes
4. Given Up My Heart
5. Unread Books
6. Evaporating Love
7. Reflection In A Shop Window On Polk
8. I Wanted A Rolex
9. When Animals Come Back
10. So Beautiful
11. Blind Your Sun

Tommy Peltier's 'Echo Park', compiled of unheard tapes from the early/mid-1970s, brings us into contact with a long-extinct creature — equal parts slinky hipster, universal soldier of the heart and snuggly loverman — the light-rockin’ tinseltown troubadour, the likes of which hasn’t been served around Hollywood since 1979! Tommy’s somewhere in the tuneful tradition of Rupert Holmes, Stephen Bishop, Andrew Gold, David Batteau and of course, Captain Fantastic and the Thin White Duke. His soulful songs and high-pitched vocals (he was once called “Tom Rapp on helium”) are paired with the requisite chopsy, jazz-enriched LA players, entrancing the ear with grooves and performances both tasty and sweet. Mixed and mastered with great zest by Jim O’Rourke (he brought new life to recordings of a similar vintage for Judee Sill’s posthumous 'Dreams Come True' back in 2005), 'Echo Park' is an encompassing trip through a whole other time and place.

A trumpet player since childhood, Tommy felt no need for pop music; he’d come of age during the west coast jazz explosion of the 1950s, hearing Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker’s legendary performances at The Haig Club, just a mile west of MacArthur Park. Inspired by the departures of the Ornette Coleman Quartet, he founded The Jazz Corps in 1963, gigging all around around town, including a residency at Hermosa Beach’s also-legendary Lighthouse. Their sound was captured on a stellar 1967 Pacific Jazz release featuring Roland Kirk. Jazz was his game, but when Tommy injured his side playing lead parts in a big band, he couldn’t blow for long without aggravating it. Something had to give.

Fortunately, there was a lot of giving in those days. In ‘68, he met aspiring singer/songwriter Judee Sill. He found her energy amazing, as she played bass in a group he was sitting in with, and it quickly became clear — he and Judee were in tune! When Tommy picked up the guitar and started writing songs, she was there with help and encouragement. As the '70s dawned, Tommy was turning 35, but he was also turning the page, like so many others, to find something amazing there on the other side.

Amazing music things flow freely up and down the tracklist of Echo Park. Inspired — not influenced — by Yes, Supertramp, ELO, Queen, Bowie, The Beatles and others, Tommy developed and honed his new music throughout the '70s. A handful of the cuts here were recorded between 1970 and ‘73, just a mile from Echo Park Lake, at an unassuming rear house set back in the hills (that Tommy’s been a resident of since 1966!). Other tracks were recorded at sessions in Hollywood in 1975 and ‘76, at now-obscure studios like Music Grinder and Heritage. Tommy was tight with a great bunch of guys: guitarist Art Johnson, who worked with far-out jazzers like John Klemmer, Paul Horn and Tim Weisburg, and was a member of the progressive jazz collective The Advancement; keyboardist Richard Thompson, whose studio rounds included The Association, John Hartford and Gábor Szabó; bassist Wolfgang Melz, who played with peaceful, easy folkies Hedge & Donna, Mark-Almond and Daniel Moore, plus Charles Lloyd, Szabó, Klemmer, and the psychedelically wigged Gravity Adjusters Expansion Band. Judee Sill’s on a couple songs too, as are former Jazz Corpsmen Lynn Blessing and Bill Plummer. Tommy’s first pop band, Jasmine, appear on 'Here Today' — his very first vocal composition, and the earliest recording here.

Lots of great times and great songs, but no contract.... which turns out to be our gain, as we release them today! Tommy has continued to play music, releasing new stuff with Plastic Theatre Art Band in 1996, and a number of releases under his own name, most recently in 2011. And at the ripe young age of 90(!), he’s still playing today! Mixed and mastered by Jim O'Rourke, 'Echo Park' is a high-flying journey through the past.

TRACK LISTING

1. Oneness
2. Judee Girl
3. National Stardom
4. Flight Of The Dancer
5. Time After Time
6. Blue Rose
7. 10,000 Greyhounds
8. A Heartbeat Away
9. Yellow Beach Umbrella
10. Here Today
11. Smile All The While

Joshua Abrams’ ‘Music For Pulse Meridian Foliation’ is the aural manifestation of an art event described as “an inbetween space and access point to a pulsating experience that connects body and land.” Like the action of a slowspiralling coil, the music information here revolves in dappling light, an evolution drawn slowly, magnetically forward, resonating there and back again. Deep-reaching in elemental movement, it leaves traces and echoes in the air - and in our ears, as our own experience evolves.

Joshua originally created this music as a four-channel installation to accompany Lisa Alvarado’s Pulse Meridian Foliation exhibition at REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles. Written for two violas (both played by James Sanders), harmonium (Lisa) and electronics (Joshua), it was designed to play on a loop throughout the gallery’s open hours between April 1 and August 20, 2023. And it did.  When playing with Natural Information Society, Joshua’s writing is directed toward the form of the music as uniquely occupied by the group. Here, he wrote in strict dialogue with the exhibit, responding with choices in composition, performance and production on ‘Music For Pulse Meridian Foliation’. A key interpretation of the exhibition is voiced by Josh in the hand-off of information between the two violas as they weave together from oppositional points across the sound stage.

In mixing the original surround sound down to two channels, Joshua worked toward the small details from left to right, placing former residents of triangulated speaker planes in a congenial spot on our present stereo azimuth - realizing, in the careful growth of this auricular border ecosystem, an essential aspect of the Pulse Meridian Foliation exhibit.

TRACK LISTING

Pulse Meridian Foliation 1
Pulse Meridian Foliation 2

'My Days of 58' is the eighth Bill Callahan album, his first since 2022. The twelve tunes here open uncanny depths of expression as Bill continues to blaze one of the most original songwriting-and-performance trails out there. With 'My Days of 58', he applies the living, breathing energies of his live shows to the studio process, sharpening his slice-of-life portraiture to cut deeper than ever before.

The core musicians featured on 'My Days of 58' is the group that toured for 2022’s 'REALITY': guitarist Matt Kinsey, saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi and drummer Jim White, whose synergy was evident in 2024’s live 'Resuscitate!'. This showed Bill, as he puts it, “that they could handle anything I threw at them,” adding:

“Improv/unpredictability/the unknown is the thing that keeps me motivated to keep making music. It’s all about listening to yourself and others. A lot of the best parts of a recording are the mistakes—making them into strengths, using them as springboards into something human.”

With this in mind, Bill prepared the songs with each player separately. Taking a note from songwriter, fan and friend Jerry DeCicca, he recorded the basic tracks for all but one song in a duo with Jim White. Meanwhile, he rehearsed with Matt, guitar to guitar, while asking Dustin to make horn charts for a few songs. Bill: “I usually just sing a melody to a horn player or let them try a few takes and go from there. This time I thought, why not get some of the record charted out. There’s always room for spontaneity on top of that. And we did indeed throw some off the cuff stuff on top of the charted horns in a couple cases where they weren’t fully doing what I wanted.

With this record I kept thinking of it as a ‘living room record.’ I’m not talking about fidelity at all here. Living room attitude. Living room vibe. Not too loud, not otherworldly. I asked for the horns to be relaxed like someone on the couch playing, not a blast from heaven or hell.”

For more spontaneity and human colour, Bill called up several other players: Richard Bowden on fiddle, whom he’d seen playing with Terry Allen and loved; pianist Pat Thrasher; bassist Chris Vreeland; and trombonist Mike St. Clair. About pedal steel player Bill McCullough, who he knew from Knife in the Water, Bill says this: “He has a real abstract approach to an abstract instrument—he’s a photographer (shot the front and back cover) and sees the steel in the same way as apertures and f-stops—foreground and midground and background—blurry and sharp. That’s how I’ve always seen the steel so it’s exciting to share that.

But hobo stew is always the idea—throwing together who I have at hand instead of following a recipe. I’m always learning. I know very little after all these years. I go by gut mostly, but sometimes forget all the possible considerations to consider.

The goal of every record at the recording part of the process is to get thrown out of Eden. Every session starts in Eden but you have to get out of there at some point.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Why Do Men Sing
2. The Man I’m Supposed To Be
3. Pathol O.G.
4. Stepping Out For Air
5. Lonely City
6. Empathy
7. West Texas
8. Computer
9. Lake Winnebago
10. Highway Born
11. And Dream Land

The music of these Louisville-NYC art-punk-rockers continues to exist bafflingly outside of time – so when better than 42 years after initial release to reissue their album debut on vinyl? New listeners will find, in addition to the roiling compulsion of its odd, dance-damaged clockwork and synthesis of feral and aestheticized values, a refined understanding of the width and breadth of “post-punk” music, from any era, known or unknown.

TRACK LISTING

1. Current
2. Prehistory Part I
3. Prehistory Part II
4. Culture Progress
5. Underworld
6. Beyond Standard

Geologist is the nom-de-théâtre of Brian Weitz, whose pursuits have been an active part of the music underground since since he was 15, playing and working in alignment with an organic ensemble of friends that would one day choose to call what they were doing Animal Collective. 'Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights?' migrates from that tradition, containing a number of surprise affects of its own. #1 is that it is the first-ever proper Geologist solo album! For real. Surprise #2 is its pursuit of a musical answer to the not-oft-enuf-ast question: what if, back in the 80s, Ethan James had made a hurdy gurdy album for SST?

Geologist’s affirmative answer to the question begins with another question—'Can I Get a Pack of Camel Lights?'. It’s also the first step into a rippling songscape in which his hurdy gurdy gives and takes multiple forms, an epic electro-acoustic textile of many colors cut from the life and times of Brian Weitz. It’s an inspired ride through his phases and stages, with traditional sounds, ritual moods, avant, prog-jazz, kraut, post-punk and minimalist vibes merging in electronic infinity.

TRACK LISTING

1. Oracle Road
2. Tonic
3. RV Envy
4. Not Trad
5. Color In The B&W
6. Compact Mirror/Last
7. Names
8. Government Job
9. Pumpkin Festival
10. Selley Duvall
11. Sonora
12. Last Names (w/Drums – Bonus Track)

For his third new album release for Drag City, Tashi Dorji turns to the electric guitar. After the furious acoustic improvisations that drove the previous two - ‘Stateless’ and ‘we will be wherever the fires are lit’ - it’s easy to imagine an album of his electric guitar improvisations as an encompassingly incendiary essay. Especially when titled 'low clouds hang, this land is on fire'. After all, this is a man capable of tearing up the place with the tactile musical violence of Bill Orcutt and Derek Bailey. And yet, this knowledge serves to set up a greater shock: the album’s disarmingly gentle musical drift.

When asked why he turned the knob down from 11 for this album, Tashi says simply, “To find the silence.” As ever with Tashi, this is a political statement. Even the search for silence takes intention and happens for a reason. In this time of such institutional inhumanity, what is there to feel but exhaustion?When seeing the faces of the deprived, what is there to feel other than hopelessness? In the face of such grief, what words are there to say?

So, Tashi got a couple of amps, moved from the shed where he’d done his first two Drag City titles, set up in a room in the family home with high ceilings and dialled in the reverb. Once the sound was in the space, reflecting in a manner that he felt congenial with his mood, he taped it. It’s a striking signal, meditative and melancholy, with a delicacy comparable to the lineage of Loren Connors or Bill Frisell, the songs at times developed with the deliberate exposition of themes in raga’s alap form. It’s a sound that lives within silence.

Once he’d laid down the sound, Tashi went back and listened to the composition of each piece. Then the words came easily.They’re the titles of these songs, they provide the narrative - ora prism, to allow us to gaze unblinking upon the awesome rot of empire. These are Tashi’s punk anthems for the year 2026… for all the years, really - to be thrown to the people outside the walls, to aid them in their quest to be allowed in

TRACK LISTING

1. Low Clouds Hang, This Land Is On Fire
2. Murmur
3. Burn The Throne
4. We Overflow The Streets And Squares Like The Sea In A Spring Tide... And That Very Instant The Tyrants Of The Earth Shall Bite The Dust
5. Black Flag Anthems
6. They Fall Because They Must Fall
7. Gathering
8. Still
9. But Go Not "back To The Sediment" In The Slime Of The Moaning Sea, For A Better World Belongs To You, And A Better Friend To Me
10. Storm The Heavens
11. A New Morning Breaks

'Forever’s spirit is high and tight, its sinews rumbling with communal joy as Glyders’ power-trio formation, in it “for life,” grooves deep into their own thing. Shuffling the deck with road-tested jams and a couple immaculate old-school tunes, 'Forever' hits with the energy of a first album – which it kinda is, now that founders Joshua Condon and Eliza Weber have met their true other, the relentless traps-man Joe Seger. 'Forever' starts now!

TRACK LISTING

1. Super Glyde
2. Moon Eyes
3. Stone Shadow
4. Hard Ride
5. New Realm
6. RTZ
7. Steppin' / Tell Me About The Rabbit
8. Thousand Miles

At twilight we find Anthony Moore, roots winding backwards to the halcyon days of Slapp Happy and the 1970s progressive art rock scene, at guitar and piano. With the atmospheres and accompaniments of AKA & Friends, he breathes infernal new life into songs from his six decades of multivarious music making. This new delivery system is unto a séance, a communal incantation, twining Anthony’s avant and pop traditions together in a darkly radiant coil of folky chamber music; a rope to lower the listener through cobwebs and murk, unveiling new life beneath Anthony’s mad old lines.

TRACK LISTING

1. Caught
2. It’s Fear
3. The Argument
4. A Man Of Custom
5. No Parlez
6. The Blistered Salver
7. World Service
8. A Different Lie

For his second solo album, master drummer Jim White travels further into expressionist landscapes of private meditation; his vehicle, an evocative duet of keyboards and drums alongside his debut as a vocalist. Translating his formidable percussive intuitions through this dialogue has given Jim a fresh compositional voice. Inner Day is like a state of nature, evoking peace and tension, rest and disquiet, all aloft on the wind of new discovery.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
Deathday
What's Really Happening
The Titles
Longwood
Cloudy
Stepping
Two Ruffys
Inner Day

SIDE B
The Blinded Bird
I Don't Do / Grand Central
Thanksgiving (Three Dead Walls)
11.12.24
Anniversary

From out of the dark, the crackle of feedback birdsong signals a return to the land of sound environments exclusive to the music of Rafael Toral. A year and a half after his epochal electric guitar album, Spectral Evolution, Traveling Light finds him sharpening his focus, moving boldly from abstract forms to concrete compositions in the form of a set of jazz standards. Based on Toral’s discography, this may seem an unlikely endeavor, but happily, Traveling Light transpires to be one of the major accomplishments in his long history, expressing these songs on their own terms through the unique listening lens of his music.

It’s nearly a century since the innovation that electrified the guitar, almost a century since the era of songs like “Easy Living” and “Body and Soul.” Since then, guitars and songs have been played hundreds of different ways by thousands of diverse individuals. After a century of progress, they probably should sound like something else again! And they do, as Toral sidesteps the traditional logic of how to play a song, moving outside the framework with which one would expect a standard to be treated.

Three decades ago, in the early years of his practice, Toral used the guitar as a generator, to create discreet texture and droning tones. Later, he abandoned the guitar entirely, focusing on self-made electronics to render his music, and the silence from which it came, with a post-free jazz perspective. For the music of Spectral Evolution and Traveling Light, Toral has combined his methodologies, radically expanding the space within their harmonies with his self-made machines, while engaging directly with his instrument and the chords of the material. The result is a listening experience of these standards, that remains “in the tradition,” even as the elongated harmonies seem to alter time such that, as Toral notes, “the chords become events on their own.” At points, the long tones animate the sacred ennui of liturgic music, the choir or the organ standing in for silent contemplation while rumbling the ground beneath our feet. Another echo of the concentric circling of music in time...

Further time-loops emerge throughout the duration of Traveling Light. The simple, organic quality of these reshaped songs and sounds, arranged by Toral for guitar with sine waves, feedback and bass guitar forms a proxy quartet of sorts! One of Toral’s self-made devices incorporates a theremin—another near-century old innovation in electronics conceived for use in classical music—to modulate feedback melodies here. Meanwhile, this altered space is visited by canonical jazz sounds on four tracks, as clarinetist José Bruno Parrinha, tenor saxophonist Rodrigo Amado, flügelhorn player Yaw Tembe and flautist Clara Saleiro each guest on one song. In this new landscape, history and tradition are exemplified, like a toast to Earth cultures made on the alien terrain of Mars. In every contour of Traveling Light’s path—arrangement, improvisation and production—the spring of the old pours through the new in an unstoppable flow. This is the sound of life, a nexus point for the music of the last century and the music ever unfurling toward the far horizons of the next century.

Out of the roiling miasma of timeless time comes a long-promised delivery from one of the constants of our era: Major Stars, and their new LP, ‘More Colors of Sound’. Fuelled by overdriven guitars and gut-punching rhythm, these veteran rockers are stalwart in their delivery of trippy, psyched-out extremes. Over the 27 years since ‘The Rock Revival’ (their Twisted Village debut), they can be counted on to come back around every three or four years or so, with something heavy picked up on their journey. This time, it’s been since 2019’s ‘Roots of Confusion Seeds of Joy’ - but what’s a few years in the larger scheme of things? Because ‘larger’ IS the Major Stars scheme of things, one that’s always cut deeply into the grooves.

It’s been since the late 1990s that Major Stars have been transmitting their signal. But even eternity wasn’t built in such an arc of time: Wayne Rogers and Kate Biggar have been crossing necks dating back to the 1980s, with ‘Crystallized Movements’’ screaming psych-punk hybrids. Tom Leonard, Major Stars’ current third axeman, has been in the mix almost as long: Luxurious Bags’ amorphous low-fi (that’s him!) was released on Twisted Village too, and Kate and Wayne and him all played together in Vermonster. After the demise of Magic Hour - Wayne and Kate’s proto-freak-folk outfit with Damon & Naomi - the three of them formed Major Stars, with Wayne singing and Dave Lynch on drums. Which brings us… not quite to today, but, the ‘More Colors of Sound’ line-up is as-was for ‘Roots of Confusion Seeds of Joy’: Kate, Tom, Wayne, Dave Dougan on bass, Casey Keenan on drums and Noell Dorsey singing lead.

‘More Colors of Sound’ had been earmarked as a title for nearly twenty years when they started work on the album that would finally bear its name. For the first ten Major Stars releases, Wayne wrote everything, but due to the way things were in 2020 and 2021, Tom and Noell wrote a bunch of things together, along with Wayne’s stuff. By the time they got to Gloucester’s Bang-A Song Studios, there was enough music for a double LP. A double’s a once-in-a-lifetime dream scenario, but once they’d done the overdubs, they skinnied it down to the 44 minutes here - 22 minutes of each songwriting team. Ultimately democratic and not too long. You don’t see that much nowadays.

As ever (and ever), the crush of the three guitars as they riff with the rhythm defines Major Stars’ sound. The work of two writing camps has produced a song-centric focus on ‘More Colors of Sound’ - one, of course, shot through with distorted tones, fevered neck-wringing solos and several extended jammers - but the production overall has a cleaner sound than its predecessor. That, plus the increased number of writers on deck gives the title a kind of kismet to go along with its historical weight.

On ‘More Colors of Sound’, Major Stars find new hues inside the incendiary approach that’s launched them so ecstatically since early times; another jar of infinity captured with a quality all its own - and it’s all in the grooves.

TRACK LISTING

Final Analysis
Midpoint
Wrapped Up In Circles
Erasable Time
Like A Siren
Here There & Gone
Blackout
Not Alone

The successor to 2022’s 'Bajascillators' glides easily into frame, but once there, 'Inland See' is deceptively immediate. It’s so dialed in, you hardly even feel how present the music (and you the listener) is. Time wharping’s always been a resident magic for Bitchin Bajas, as is flow, which is translucent like water here. That’s the Inland See vibe, unique unto itself. In turn, each of the four songs here are entirely within themselves, all together forming an essential whole. The coincision’ll cause yer breath to shorten, like an exciting and non-fatal kind of exercise! New freedoms, yet more molecular structure in each one.

With every successive Bitchin Bajas release, we see that the real key for them is a sense of discovery, that tingle that comes when you feel something breaking through. The sky opening up. The stuff that fills this 'Inland See' holds you up powerfully, as if you’re floating, saltwater or helium-wise – effervescent, effortless, elemental.

An increasing sense of the Bajas' physicality – what’s ephemeral, what’s mercurial, and what sits inside us after it’s all over. This music was mostly written on the road. It’s an unusual happening for Bitchin Bajas! They were open for it, though – the landmarked 'Bajascillators' kept them out there for a while, and when inspiration struck, there they rolling. When it was time to render it to tape and find the record there, they did the whole thing at Electrical Audio. Recording all together in the room there lent a sense of space, which they dug and captured as natural as possible. No reverb at all added after the fact. Everything that’s there was in system, directed through the interconnects with cool hands. And once Inland See is flowing toward you, through the hi-fi, you feel it all in the air.

TRACK LISTING

1. Skylarking
2. Reno
3. Keiji Dreams
4. Graut

The 1st clash of the necks from polymath guitarists MacKay & Walker, taped live at Chicago’s own Whistler bar for release on the Whistler label. Reissued by Drag City ‘cause of these dudes’ uncanny alchemy and their constant, ever-melding flow. It’s an imperative: there’s not enough records around with such intense properties! Coincidentally, it came out 10 years ago. Big deal! Drag City would have done it when it was only 9 years old too – they just got busy, okay?

TRACK LISTING

1. It Takes A Quilt
2. Rickshaw Waltz
3. Gold Season
4. Land Of Plenty
5. Promise Me
6. Blues For Arthur
7. Silver Cup

Waving his axe of choice, Sir Richard Bishop once again summons forth damnable truth and beauty on an all-new musical kamikaze run through histories both written and - as of yet - not commonly known. Since the dying days of the 20th century, the composer / player of spirited polytheistic guitar recitals including ‘Salvador Kali’, ‘Improvika’, ‘The Freak of Araby’, ‘Tangier Sessions’ and, most recently, ‘Oneiric Formulary’ has worked feverishly to wrench and wrangle all the music that has and can possibly fall out of the guitar from east to west across this great, totally fucked world of ours. With ‘Hillbilly Ragas’, Sir Rick stretches his callused hands across the waters to draw diverse musics back to his shack with the gladiatorial bloodthirst and balance of gravitas and jocosity we expect from him in every hot little moment of play.

“There were a few different approaches I utilized for this release. First and foremost, I wanted to go back to basics, to strip away any excesses and keep it as simple as possible: one man, one acoustic guitar, no overdubs, no effects, no electricity. Taking several cues from the sounds most often associated with the so-called American Primitive guitar style, I wanted to avoid any traditional approaches and instead try something more raw and aggressive, concentrating more on rhythm and movement as opposed to anything predictable or overly melodic, while also keeping my particular interpretive ideas about East Indian Raga in the mix.

“I’ve always felt that the majority of what is considered to be American Primitive music, while certainly based on historical American musical traditions, never really had any sounds that I personally thought of as being primitive - it always seemed too orderly, too developed, and too safe. Way too safe. I found that playing with a sort of reckless abandon was the best way to remain outside of the usual musical language found in this genre of music, while still being able to establish itself within its framework, through determination and force if nothing else. It's a much more savage approach, which I believe is how it should have been all along, in order to at least give proper credence to the semantics of the form.

“During the recording process I was envisioning an undiscovered mountain man or ‘hillbilly’ who had remained hidden in his own private backwoods; one who never learned, or even heard about, any traditional musical canon that he was expected to work within. So what we have here with ‘Hillbilly Ragas’ are nine pieces for solo acoustic guitar, each one representing a different excursion into the dark woods - the untamed explorations of a musical loner, an outsider, maybe even an undesirable, embodying a peculiar folklore and turning it into sound - creating his own folk music in the process. He's still out there, fueled by moonshine, his supernatural surroundings, and a fuck-all attitude!” - Richard Bishop

TRACK LISTING

They Shall Take Up Serpents
Buzzard’s Curse
Rhythm Methodist
Worn Slap Out
Pass The Juggernaut
Raw Eggs And Rooster Juice
Head Bone In The ‘Tater Hole
Cuttin’ The Shine
War Powder

The third time’s the charm! Or perhaps — the third time’s another charming excursion into the seemingly infinite universe of rhythm spontaneously created whenever guitarist Oren Ambarchi, bassist Johan Berthling, and percussionist Andreas Werliin plug in together. However you choose to look at it, several years into their collaborative endeavour, and a little more than a year on from 'Ghosted II', Ambarchi, Berthling and Werliin are back with a new finding, constituting fresh developments of their sound — if not their album-titling ambition (in other words, if you can’t guess it’s called 'Ghosted III', you’re just not paying enough attention!).

In actuality, the sound of this trio has been all about new developments since they first started playing together. That’s something to be simply expected when dropping the tonearm on any of their records, which is a very nice thing. There’s also something to be said for constancy, especially when it produces such stimulating variations of tone and mood within the trio format. So, all good — since there wasn’t anything broke, there was no need to fix it. Instead, just do it again. With that credo, Ambarchi, Berthling and Werliin returned to Stockholm’s Studio Rymden to continue the incredible standard of capture that distinguished both 'Ghosted' and 'Ghosted II'.

Although they took more studio time than ever before (three whole days!), 'Ghosted III’s new development is an increased immediacy in their performances, something a little looser and wilder than than their first two albums — and something, no doubt, that’s been developed by their encounters during the several dozen-plus gigs played since their debut. Thus, their ability to lock in and focus, hanging on to the smallest of details, is here enhanced by an expansive lightness of being. Such potentially polar skill sets could well make for uneven chemistry — but in the hands of these three, a sparkling variety of new jams occurs. They seem to be available to try anything these days, at times playing with the exuberance of prog-rockers or new-wave popsters, alongside the eternal energies of their established styles: ambient neo-jazz, post-kraut, minimal funk. In the end, their shared instinct shapes the varied emissions into structure reaching ever further into the ether — giving 'Ghosted III' a singular quality belonging only to the trio that is Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin.

TRACK LISTING

1. Yek
2. Do
3. She
4. Chahar
5. Panj
6. Shesh

“the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern; to see shapes or make pictures out of randomness.”

Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke toured Europe for two weeks in 2023, a wonderful passage through France, Switzerland, Italy and Ireland; Pareidolia, the duo's fifth collaborative release, is a remix made up of resonances from those shows. The movement of sound in each performance and the relationships of sound between them; a dynamic medley of colour and shape to pulse through earbuds, speaker cones and the air immediately surrounding you.

Improvisation is the preferred collaborative mode for Eiko and Jim. They both prepare separately, without discussing anything beforehand. The dialogue in the moment determines the performance; anything that takes place is a possible point of departure, allowing for a unique experience each time they play.

These 2023 shows marked the first time Jim and Eiko had played together outside Japan. Perhaps the flow of parts unpacked from their respective computers was inspired by the experiences of the tour: the nature of the assembled audience, the quality of the meal on the day at hand. Additionally, Eiko played flute and they both played a bit of harmonica intermittently throughout the performances. These live acoustic signals were routed back to the hard drives, to provide further material to play with — and as they travelled, recordings of the previous nights’ shows were among the materials for the next performance. With all this to play with, there was much fun to be had every night. Pareidolia’s final mix is one further rearrangement of the elements — comping — say, a bit of Jim from Paris against Eiko in Dublin for a minute, before bringing them both back into the same room for a spell before another set of interactions comes into play. The choices and edits represented here make yet another unique dialogue, as well as a kind of 'best' version of what they were doing on the tour.

For us at home, the sense of inevitability in the parts as they flow together might suggest structure; happily, this occurs without Eiko and Jim really committing to anything of the sort. Their available sound sources could present as a hot-wired noise onslaught, with all faders up full. Endless possible interpretations to be had on either side of the experience! This is one of several ways that the LP title and sequence of song titles come into play. Listeners hearing something more should have a good look in the mirror and perhaps consider the old saying: “Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.”

It could only help!

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
Par
Ei

SIDE B
Do
Lia

Back from the undead is this new pressing of the first of all Gastr del Sol records, ‘The Serpentine Similar’. It is one of several distinct initiators of a definitive musical drift in the 1990s, and a drift all of its own, to boot.

At the time, this album was largely heard within an underground whose boundaries were clearly defined - but if today’s sound-pool of ‘commercial’ music is deeper and wider than it was back then, it is without a doubt due to the cracking open of certain doors of perception by Gastr del Sol, alongside their esteemed others.

The year was 1992. After a bruising run of tour dates the year before, the final lineup of Bastro, a power-trio of David Grubbs, Ken (Bundy) Brown and John McEntire, retired, exhausted. Shortly thereafter, they were rebirthed, sans drums, via a new set of ideas composed in the cut-down configuration of Grubbs on guitars, keyboards and vocals and Brown on bass. Playing in duo format opened up sound and intention, leaving the need for speed (and the stock in rock) out, while letting in an expanse of brooding, droning acoustic space that highlighted the songs’ serpentine shapes. This was something so radically different as to require a new calling card: henceforth, Gastr del Sol.

Signing to Teen Beat, Gastr del Sol completed ‘The Serpentine Similar’ in late 1992 for release the following year (the Drag City reissue came in 1997). In the final rendering, ‘The Serpentine Similar’’s roof-rent, white-sky execution was attenuated with several percussion appearances from the prodigal John McEntire. Over the next five years, his cameo presence was a constant in Gastr del Sol’s steadily-evolving tradition of significant breaks from tradition at every turn. There would be an even more significant tradition-breaker onboard for all this; following the release of ‘The Serpentine Similar’, Jim O’Rourke joined Grubbs in Gastr as Brown exited (to focus on Tortoise, with McEntire et al). For the new Gastr duo, a world of new directions in music awaited, the future became the past, and the music of Gastr del Sol emerged from the thin air, then returned there.

Now, ‘The Serpentine Similar’ has been returned to vinyl from the temporal streams of contemporary music listening, a glorious rematerializing of all its spatial details and available to independent retailers on LP for the first time in 20 years.

TRACK LISTING

A Watery Kentucky
Easy Company
A Jar Of Fat
Ursus Arctos Wonderfilis
Eye Street
For Soren Mueller
Serpentine Orbit
Even The Odd Orbit

With a room fulla fine pickers and a set of Hollywood orchestral cues to kill for, Cory Hanson proclaims 'I Love People'! His 4th solo album drills down (baby) on a dryly parallax worldview, with songs about all those people he loves and all the crazy things they get up to. As ringmaster for a circus show of classic folk and rock tropes, Cory tugs at our heartstrings with expert misdirection, embracing tradition by throwing it out, into the wind.

TRACK LISTING

1. Bird On A Swing
2. Joker
3. I Love People
4. I Don’t Believe You
5. Santa Claus Is Coming Back To Town
6. Lou Reed
7. Final Frontier
8. Texas Weather
9. Bad Miracles
10. Old Policeman
11. On The Rocks

A lush, energizing contemporary pop record, built on heart-swelling minimal/maximal electronic production + deep feels. Reality’s breaking and rebirth is happening, one day at a time – essential asks deconstructed and refitted in new ways. Unconventional songwriting/performance duo Sharpie Smile ride inspired waves of futurist sound art, a dreamy, ethereal vision-quest through serpentine soul-terrain. RIYL: SOPHIE, 100 gecs, Ouklou

TRACK LISTING

1. Bells
2. Disappears
3. The Slide
4. Answer
5. Love Or Worship
6. So Far (Feat. Leng Bian)
7. Brick Or Stone
8. New Flavor
9. The Letter
10. The Staircase

Ty hits the big sky trail of our good ol’ frontier empire, discovering non-stop bangers and inspired new sonics around every bend. With lyrics co-written by long-time collaborator, filmmaker Matt Yoka, Ty's glittering rhythm arrangements move with fresh scansion, inviting in sweeps of strings and horns to further the charge righteously. You’re invited too! Don’t miss the trip – the country inspires awe from up on Ty’s high-octane ride.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Ty & Co get all country on their latest instalment of garagey punk rock, eschewing some of the more frenetic aspects of their sound for this drifty mix of lysergic picnic fare and rhythmic head-bobbing instrumentation. For me, the best iteration of Segall yet.

TRACK LISTING

1. Shoplifter
2. Possession
3. Buildings
4. Shining
5. Skirts Of Heaven
6. Fantastic Tomb
7. The Big Day
8. Hotel
9. Alive
10. Another California Song

This is the first collaboration between Al Cisneros (OM, Sleep) and David Eugene Edwards (Wovenhand, 16 Horsepower) on limited 10" vinyl.

TRACK LISTING

1. Pillar Of Fire
2. Capernaum

A bold third missive from the Australian duo – Helen Franzmann (McKisko) and Mick Turner (Dirty Three, Tren Brothers) - who sound like they literally dreamed themselves into being, and perhaps might even still be in the dream! Propelling their uniquely twisted aural circus to heights of exaltation and effect, Mess Esque build out their handmade, openhearted soul into new dimensions, pushing them – and yeah, us! – into more vivid states of being.

TRACK LISTING

1. Light Showroom
2. Take Me To Your Infinite Garden
3. Liminal Space
4. That Chair
5. Crow's Ash Tree
6. Let Me Know You
7. Armour Your Amor
8. No Snow

Bag People were Chicagoans who outgrew their home in the maelstrom of the early 80s NYC post-punk/ no-wave scene. They weren’t around long, but their compulsive noise-rock sound, unearthed from tapes lost for 40 years, looms large and stands tall next to the efforts of better-known contemporaries like Sonic Youth and Swans. A righteous puke of art-punk from a time of incredible brokenness in the world – in other words, savage sounds for today!

TRACK LISTING

1. Fire God
2. Dead Meat
3. Parade
4. UPS
5. Blessed Ignorance
6. I Got A Leotard
7. Lark's Vomit
8. Instrumental
9. Sweet Roughness Blues
10. Long Way Back
11. What's What
12. Don't Make Me (Live At CBGB 1983)

Geologist and D.S. meet in an expanding sonic field built up from a handful of pieces posted online. Lovingly reordering a few short minutes of music featuring the fine folk guitar chops and magic vibe of Sleepy Doug Shaw, Brian Weitz (Animal Collective’s Geologist) works a variety of loops and edits through his modular system to create new pleasing shapes from old. A salutary and affirmative trip through peaceful idylls and energizing spaces.

TRACK LISTING

1. Route 9 Falls
2. Wit Of The Watermen
3. Ripper Called
4. Loose Gravel
5. Petticoat
6. Knuckles To Nostrils
7. Avarice Edit

Prison have been active since 2015, but if you didn’t catch them live in NYC, then you didn’t know - until late in the Summer of 2023, when ‘Upstate’ dropped. Prison hit HARD, with jams so long and varied, they had to have two titles each and the album was only four songs long, one per side. ‘Upstate’ was heavy, but always the fun kind. And there are so many other kinds of heavy yet to be.

‘Downstate’, the second official Prison stint, shows you some, stretching to insane new places while pumping out even more of the toughest jams around. Leap-hogging from one vibe to the next, Prison cop a variety of grooves, from minimalist (like Guru Guru), sweat-shaking (Stooges) and chaotic (No Trend) - it feels like they’re coming from everywhere! They switched it up in almost every way they could this time. But that’s just Prison being Prison.

At its core, Prison are a multi-headed beast, and ‘Downstate’ is built to showcase their swarming freakscene. Recording this one in Rockaway meant they could get Prison family and friends to drop in. Going ‘Downstate’ with core Prisoners Sarim Al-Rawi, Matt Lilly and Paul Major are guitarists Marc Razo and Adam Reich, bassist Matt Leibowitz and Dave Smoota Smith on trombone (his first time ever in Prison). Also present is the late, lamented Sam Jayne, a fellow lifer whose spirit will act as a guide for the rest of Prison’s time. All he brought to the session was a bottle of tequila. He just wanted to jam - and on all borrowed stuff too. He didn’t care.

With this many hands on deck, Prison play all kinds of things, from insane distorted rock to dreamy psychedelia, plus some jazzy and gutsy blues shit too. They got some of the lighter side of Prison in there, of course, in addition to screaming and slamming. It was all recorded in a day, with a couple of overdubs, but it took a while to get the mixes right. There were a lot of moments that they didn’t know would lead to anything, but when listening back later, then they heard where they were going. All that had to get in there somehow. Plus, they had to get the drums and the reverb right.

Another level to the sound on ‘Downstate’ is in the hard cuts and savvy fades in the edit. Matt Lilly sequenced the mixes at home using two CDJs fed into a Numark DJ deck and dubbed down live to cassette, then they sent the tape to engineer Matt Walsh to duplicate timings and fades and all that. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by critical mass while you’re listening, this could be why. It’s for sure part of what makes these forty-three minutes of time give anyone who listens an entire night’s worth of dreams! Like trapdoors taking you from where you thought you were standing to someplace entirely different, wondering if what just happened was ten seconds or one million years long.

TRACK LISTING

Millions Of Armies (Wipe 'Em Out)
Crocodile (Alligator)
Traveling Lady (In Prison)
Up In A Tree
Eyes For Keys
That's My Noise
Where's My Food
In The Tall Grass
Made For You
Down To County

The remix album, with marvellously creative EDM remakes from some of the best powerbook players of the day: Mouse On Mars, Jim O’Rourke, Kid Loco, Schneider TM, Stock, Hausen & Walkman, Cornelius and The High Llamas themselves. In addition to showcasing this emerging new generation of digital masters, the treatments here also highlight an oft-undersung aspect of The High Llamas’ sound – the influence of Krautrock.

TRACK LISTING

1. ShowShowstop Hic Hup (Mouse On Mars Remix)
2. Homespin Rerun (Cornelius Remix)
3. Homerun Übershow (Schneider TM Remix)
4. Milting Tindmills (The High Llamas Remix)
5. Mini-Management (Jim O’Rourke Remix)
6. The Space Raid (Kid Loco Remix)
7. Reflections In A Plastic Glass (3 Point Remix)

After the high times and critical-mass arrangements of the previous two records, 'Snowbug' exuded a breezy, spare, morning-after vibe. Edified by all manner of world-folk, classic Brazilian pop and the first volumes of the Ethiopiques comp, the Llamas recorded in London with Fulton Dingley and in Chicago with Bundy K. Brown and Jim O’Rourke engineering at Electrical Audio and John McEntire mixing at Soma. Snowbug is an understated, underrated gem.

TRACK LISTING

1. Bach Ze
2. Harpers Romo
3. Hoops Hooley
4. Cookie Bay
5. Triads
6. The American Scene
7. Go To Montecito
8. Janet Jangle
9. Amin
10. Daltons Star
11. Cotton To The Bell
12. Green Coaster
13. Cut The Dummy Loose

Having passed – at least figuratively – through hundreds of years over the course of their previous two albums, the good ship High Llamas docked, fully loaded, into a congenial present moment for once in its life. O’Hagan’s continued work with Tim Gane and Stereolab caused a healthy dose of electronica to spike the Llamas’ already heady brew, creating an apex of late 90s-style neo-exotica. RIYL: Mouse On Mars, Oval, Grand Royal, Dots and Loops.

TRACK LISTING

1. Twisto Teck
2. The Sun Beats Down
3. HiBall Nova Scotia
4. Tilting Windmills
5. Glide Time
6. Bouncy Glimmer
7. Three Point Scrabble
8. Homespin Rerun
9. Painters Paint
10. Evergreen Vampo
11. Showstop Hip Hop
12. Over The River
13. End On Tick Tock
14. Didball
15. Jazzed Carpenter
16. Lobby Bears

Mickey Newbury’s ‘An American Trilogy’ was one of the most talked-about and lauded reissues of 2011 - a long-overdue affirmation for a songwriter and performer who has for years enjoyed cult acclaim but belongs in the ranks of the American greats.

Keeping the love alive, Drag City present a split single that pairs Mickey Newbury’s recording of ‘Heaven Help the Child’ - the title track of the most refined and under-appreciated album in Newbury’s trilogy - with a new version of the song by Bill Callahan that invokes the stately, elegiac spirit of the original while reworking its intricacies for his own unique voice and style.

Callahan has made no secret of his admiration for Mickey Newbury, even name-checking him (alongside George Jones, Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash, as part of a roll call of the most American of contemporary songwriter performers) in the song ‘America’, off his acclaimed 2011 album, ‘Apocalypse’.

“There’s something psychedelic and transcendent about Mickey’s best work,” says Callahan, “and when he gets into the realms of songs like ‘Heaven Help The Child’, where he spans generations and flies over time while still maintaining a singular mind, he’s imparting a truly epic knowledge and vision. The song always reminded me of the movie ‘Once Upon a Time in America’.”

A wildly ambitious, cross-generational odyssey, written in 1971 against the backdrop of the waning days of the Vietnam War, ‘Heaven Help The Child’ is the closest Newbury ever came to writing a pure protest song - albeit one that, in true Newbury style, breaks the mould and emotes heartfelt paeans, seeking solutions rather than mere dissent.

Allusive, elusive and emotionally direct, the song conflates myth and memoir until the two are inseparable and interchangeable. A reference in the lyrics to Fitzgerald and Hemingway draws on the idea that, for Newbury and his peers, Nashville of the 1970s was like Paris in the 1920s, a meeting place for writers in exile; outsiders working within the mainstream of culture, whose artistic concerns were too epic and personal to be constrained by it.

“The point I was trying to make in that song,” said Newbury, “is that every generation thinks that its problems are unique where its problems really are as old as man. There are no new problems; there are only new faces having them.”

Mickey Newbury often referred to ‘Heaven Help The Child’ as his ‘second Trilogy’, the first being ‘An American Trilogy’, the song with which he is most closely associated yet, paradoxically, did not write. But ‘Heaven Help The Child’ is Newbury through and through: the work of a master songwriter at the height of his powers.

TRACK LISTING

Mickey Newbury - Heaven Help The Child (LP Version)
Bill Callahan - Heaven Help The Child

For the Llamas’ 1992 debut, Sean O’Hagan, working the sextant to navigate a post-Microdisney course in the musical world, posted them up as a guitar pop band (RIYL: NRBQ, Big Star, Steely Dan), with nine exquisitely crafted examples of the oft out-of-step sound. Had there been no more after this, Santa Barbara would still be sought-after buried treasure by the perennial waves of voyagers seeking these sweet, jangling spices to this very day.

TRACK LISTING

1. Put Yourself Down
2. Birdies Sing
3. Banking On Karma
4. Market Traders
5. Travel
6. The Taximan’s Daughter
7. Period Music
8. Holland
9. Apricots

The High Llamas discover America – yes, it had been done before, but not via their envisaged pilgrims’ passage. Energized by the breakthroughs of 'Gideon Gaye', they went all-in, producing a wide-screen epic further exploring their unique agenda. The reference points multiplied, stretching through realms of classic pop and jazz, soundtrack music, exotica and neo-Americana, while charting a journey through musical landscapes of abiding lightness.

TRACK LISTING

1. Cuckoo Casino
2. Sparkle Up
3. Literature Is Fluff
4. Nomads
5. Snapshot Pioneer
6. Ill-fitting Suits
7. Recent Orienteering
8. The Hot Revivalist
9. Phoney Racehorse
10. Dressing Up The Old Dakota
11. D.C. 8
12. Doo-Wop Property
13. Theatreland
14. A Friendly Pioneer
15. Cuckoo’s Out
16. Peppy
17. There’s Nobody Home
18. The Hokey Curator
19. Campers In Control
20. Double Drift
21. Island People
22. Incidentally N.E.O.
23. Tides
24. Nomad Strings
25. Pilgrims
26. Rustic Vespa
27. Folly Time
28. Hawaiian Smile
29. Instrumental Suits

The “Great Escape Artist” is back! No, not THAT one – dude’s dead! We’re talking about Papa M. And HE’s talking ‘bout Harry Houdini – in the album title, anyway, not sure about anywhere else.

So, six years since his last LP, the all-acoustic 'A Broke Moon Rises', Papa M rolls into the shred zone, buns glazing, with his fifth full length in 25 years of Papa M-itude! Six fat-assed songs – a couple ballads, yeah, but mostly real all-out groovers here.

TRACK LISTING

1. Thank You For Talking To Me (When I Was Fat)
2. Ode To Mark White
3. People’s Free Food Program
4, Barfighter
5. Rainbow Of Gloom
6. Devil Tongue

December 2001, Maida Vale: Bill Callahan’s “Smog” perform with demonstrative zeal for their British witness at the BBC, shimmering and hissing with a Lynchian vibe of U.S. darkness in the invariable shadows of the fallen towers. Callahan & band (Jessica Billey, Mike Saenz and Jim White) cover Stevie Nicks, Lou Reed and Smog with grey, ashen resolve and tour-torn flexibility, amassing a bruised, plaintive essence of humanity with their efforts.

TRACK LISTING

1.Beautiful Child
2. Cold Discovery
3. Dirty Pants
4. Jesus

An excursion in electronic sound unpacking Dean Spunt’s fascination with language – in this instance, instrumentally – the syntax of the systems and processes of a 64-voice Mo’Phatt module distilled through his non-aesthetic aesthetic. Wacked digital soundscapes bounce colorfully across the stereo azimuth, by turns meditative, compulsive and consumptive; post-ambient neo-exotica that hinges upon a giddy conflation of cosmic and comic.

Dean Spunt’s all-new Basic Editions is an excursion in electronic sound that instrumentally unpacks his fascination with language — in this case, the syntax of systems and processes. By turns meditative, compulsive and consumptive, Basic Editions distills a 64 voice module through a headful of ideas — somewhat like pouring a cornucopia of possible ambient moods and EZ listening impulses backwards through a funnel, inspiring a deceptively absurd rainbow of soul to spray out the other end.

With this new release, Dean IDs his process as “using sounds, rather than making sounds.” This approach to music-making is a train of thought that’s been rolling out from the far horizon of the past for ages now — but for Dean, whose previous works within and without No Age depended on their making of sounds, it’s a fresh work stance. Given, however, No Age’s traditional sonic manipulations (via loops and treatments), Basic Editions delivers further unexpected hard-rights and lefts in the non-aesthetic aesthetic that has defined Dean’s path over the past two decades. Steering toward wacked digital soundscapes that bounce colorfully across the stereo azimuth, Dean creates a kind of post-ambient neo-exotica that hinges upon a giddy conflation of cosmic and comic.

And to think that it all happened ’cause of a glimpse of an E-mu Mo’Phatt at the local online gearery! Dean was looking for a box to give him a new angle; not knowing anything about this one seemed like the right path through the next phase of his own adventure. This “urban dance synth” was made great use of in hip-hop productions around the turn of the millennium. There’s lots more to know about the machines of that time — choose your own rabbit hole — but the takeaway here is that it generates a finite amount of very circa-2000 sounds and he got it for fifty bucks. Inspired, Dean spent a minute getting its basic capacities in hand, while acquiring a few other boxes with compatible cards (more sounds!). Then he was rolling — doing gigs with his Mo’Phatt and a midi-keyboard while recording more involved collages at home.

In one way of thinking, Basic Editions is the sound of Dean not being influenced by anything — how could he be? The sounds were all preset! There is, however, an instinctiveness to pushing a closed system in a curatorial manner, and it’s here that Dean’s inclinations took the wheel of the proceedings, bending the farmed sounds in and out of color and shape, creating improbable constructions whose gears clash together and revolve with an odd combination of nerviness and chill. It’s all RIYL: Moebius, Nuno Canavarro, General Magic & Pita, Carl Stone, Jon Hassell.

Further refinements are provided with the artwork, which reprocesses generic graphic information sourced from various modules, while the album title tips its cap to a fine rank-and-file clothing line offered at K-Mart. Courtesy of Dean Spunt, a Basic Editions all its own — now on the rack for counter-insurgent sonic wanderers everywhere!

TRACK LISTING

Side 1
Gonzo Bop
Critic In A Coma
European Cardboard
Boom Times At The Phatt Farm
Apricot Child

Side 2
Confusion Is SysEx
Highlighter Bombastic
Fructose
The Eternal Present
Find Me In The Forums

Anthony’s post-Slapp Happy output, for years an underrated-to-outright unknown quantity, achieves a new dimensional plane with this third archival release from his personal tape library. Home of the Demo triangulates upon the art-pop qualities found in his previously unreleased 1976 LP OUT, and ‘79’s new wave-adjacent Flying Doesn’t Help, finding Anthony’s early/mid-80s home recordings drifting whimsically in and out of the actual mainstream.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Ballad Of Sarah Bellum
2. One World
3. Me And Neil Diamond
4. A Different Lie
5. Judy, Judy
6. Lucia Still Alive
7. Midnight Sun
8. Coralie
9. Earthbound Misfit
10. Cold Love

Demos and unreleased songs from Wand’s salad days, the time of the immortal Ganglion Reef. Available for download since 2017, this album’s at last firmly sunk into vinyl grooves that realize its fullest potential in a listener’s ears. These light, fizzy versions have distinctive gleaming magic energies all of their own and they fly thrillingly through the air. Catch a wave through beautifully-abandoned space on your turntable eternal!

TRACK LISTING

1. Send/Receive (Alpha NM)
2. Clearer Mix 2
3. Broken Candle
4. Fire On The Mountain Parts I-II-III
5. Flying Golem
6. Fugue State 23-23-23
7. Strange Inertia Ctrl Alt Death
8. Growing Up Boys
9. Generator Larping
10. The Screaming Eye 2
11. The Leap
12. Gong Report 4_11

Mere months after inflicting a massive case of Vertigo on the world, Wand ride on, plating the pre-release digi-single 'Help Desk' alongside 'Goldfish', a bonus dose of oceanic luminescence from Vertigo’s Big Bang. Plus, in the name of the ever-expanding universe (and the much-needed dream-extension app!), three remixes – from Beat Detectives, Dead Rider and Dean Spunt – for good measure. Not sure where you’re at? Check in with the 'Help Desk'.

TRACK LISTING

1. Help Desk
2. Goldfish
3. Help Desk (Beat Detectives Remix)
4. Help Desk (Dead Rider Remix)
5. Help Desk (Dean Spunt Remix)

Veteran electronic music composer Jill Fraser’s new work takes stock of generations and lifetimes of memory, speculating on how the spirit of our songs might be interpreted after we’re gone. With her 1978 Serge Modular, Prism Modular and Ableton Push 3 in the circuit path, she recomposes a stack of American revival hymns, making new creations for the future. A fluent meditation upon mortality and rebirth amid numinous infinities of dimensional sound.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
When We All Get To Heaven
Amen 1

Side B
Earthly Pleasures
Beautiful Summer

Side C
Message Of Mercy
Amen 2

Side D
Monarch Of The Sky
I Stand Amazed

Sun Araw’s tenth studio album, ‘Lifetime’, continues to investigate space as a motionless field against which many motions are observed. Stasis: wheels within and wheels without.

Pressed on two 45 RPM discs.

Mixed by Cameron Stallones and Jake Viator, mastered by JJ Golden.

TRACK LISTING

LIFETIME
HYRDROMBULE
PORPHYR
BAMBO
HAD A FEELIN'
ZERO DECLINATION
APHELION
SPHERES

Six Organs of Admittance extend their annum of unlikely delights - begun in March 2024 with ‘Time is Glass’, the first new Six Organs of Admittance album in four years, and joined in June with the most unlikely awesome collab of 2024: Shackleton and Six Organs of Admittance, ‘Jinxed by Being’ - with the release of ‘Companion Rises (Twig Harper Remix)’, which expands the zone of disbelief simply by being the third Six Organs-branded release in one year. Also, by pushing the boundaries in all the manners that matter - psychologically, spiritually, philosophically and sonically - into a new dimensional space.

‘Companion Rises’ dropped in February 2020. Its new techniques in sound generation called for an aggressive new moment, with heavy Six Organs touring scheduled for the year ahead. Yeah...flash forward to 2023! As Ben Chasny picked up the pieces following the Big Blink, he had to think of what could have been, like: “What would ‘Companion Rises’ sound like if I had known how crazy the world it was built for was gonna be?”

By then, Six Organs had moved on - both ‘Time is Glass’ and ‘Jinxed by Being’ were in the works - but here was a thought: ‘Companion Rises’ was a record about the weirdness of California. Right then, Twig Harper was touching down in Cali after stints in Baltimore and Chicago. Ben had been onboard with Twig’s shit since the days when Nautical Almanac burst out of Michigan like an engorged, inflamed, screaming blood vessel. And Twig’s chaos sense has evolved and refined in amazing ways over the years (see releases on Hanson Records, Thrill Jockey, Planam, Open Mouth, Primordial Void, Radical Documents, Ha Ha Ha Cassettes and Twig’s own Heresee label), so when Ben asked him if he would do whatever he wanted, it felt like full circles were colliding when Twig said yeah!

Once Twig had measured out the physics of ‘Companion Rises’, most of his Remix was done up in his van where he, otherwise homeless, was living. When he got the stems from Ben, he just started working it out right there, rather than spending the time finding a place to live. It’s more fun running signal through his Ableton DSP rack, always. And it worked out well - he’ll probably move a bunch more times in his life, but this record is forever.

With the Twig Harper remixes, the maximal qualities of original ‘Companion Rises’ DNA are evoked via omission: to recreate the implied construction of Six Organs’ spirit realm, Twig isolated source sounds, triggered new data off those sounds, then edited the new readouts. To the naked ear, it sounds to be a highly stimulating new example in modern electronic minimal classical music. The assiduous Organs-head will no doubt find a few Easter eggs here, but mostly, this is new dimensional space made of the not-so-old one.

‘Companion Rises (Twig Harper Remix)’ is like two journeys in one, juxtaposing Twig’s new-to-Cali musings with Six Organs’ original borne-andbread wanderings. Play them back to back, they play fresh through and through. Or play ’em on top of each other and wait for the moment of concision to arrive. And now it sounds as weird as Ben wanted; maybe almost as weird as the world outside today.

TRACK LISTING

Pacific (Twig Harper Remix)
Two Forms Moving (Twig Harper Remix)
The Scout Is Here (Twig Harper Remix)
Black Tea (Twig Harper Remix)
Companion Rises (Twig Harper Remix)
The 101 (Twig Harper Remix)
Haunted And Known (Twig Harper Remix)
Mark Yourself (Twig Harper Remix)
Worn Down To The Light (Twig Harper Remix)

The first official reissue of Dorothy Carter’s folk-music exegesis comes 46 years after its original release, 20 years after Dorothy passed, and 11 years before the centennial of her birth. Yet it seems right on time for a new celebration of her music. Appalachian folk tunes, old and ancient psalms and hymns, Scottish, Irish, French and Israeli melodies, and original tunes flow together effortlessly in hypnotic garden of eternal world musics.

TRACK LISTING

1. Troubadour Song
2. Binnorie
3. Troubadour Songs On The Psaltery
4. Make A Joyful Sound
5. Lark In The Morning
6. Balinderry
7. Tree Of Life
8. Visiting Song
9. The King Of Glory
10. The Morning Star
11. Ukrainian Carol
12. The Cuckoo
13. Masquerade
14. Shirt Of Lace

'Love Rudiments' is a meditation by Ty Segall on his first love: the drums. Known popularly as a singing guitar player, he generally starts the recording of his songs by laying down a drum track. 'Love Rudiments' kicks off with drums and percussion, then adds a few other percussive and production aspects. It travels a great journey in this configuration. However, 'Love Rudiments' wasn’t written or performed to present as some kind of solo drums album - it’s just another music album, with vibes (figurative as well as literal), feels, a theme and a through-line.

Never one to shy away from a challenge, Ty’s made an instrumental album of percussive music that rides the wild surf of a waxing-then-waning love affair - from the first blinding look, to the eventual recognition, that look back at love’s rudiments, viewed from beyond and outside that seemingly infinite sensation.

And why not? Drums are a melody instrument too. Ty plays them with precision and sensitivity, delving deep into the textures of timpani, vibraphone, xylophone, percussion and e-drums, all of them occupying space within the luxe stereo spread of the drumkit. In the process, a psychological space is opened - a private emotional location where only two can meet.

'Love Rudiments' reembodies the passion and compulsion that drives all of Ty Segall’s music in a suite of moments played on orchestral batterie to explore the most delicate passages of human interaction - playing on the bones of love.

TRACK LISTING

1. First Look
2. First Conversation
3. Walk Home Pt. 1
4. Getting Ready
5. Arrival
6. The Dance
7. Walk Home Pt. II
8. First Touch
9. Honeymoon/Life
10. Confrontation
11. Argument
12. Separation
13. Realization
14. Love Rudiments

The Nathan Bowles Trio’s ‘Are Possible’ is a spark-throwing, undulating fusion of styles played (mainly) on banjo, upright bass and drums. The individual perspectives of Nathan, double bassist Casey Toll (Jake Xerxes Fussell, Mt. Moriah) and drummer Rex McMurry (CAVE) work together in an easy-rolling manner, but one that contains an expansive, ass-shaking confabulation of ideas.

Nathan’s solo music-making explorations with the banjo are evidence of the range of possible places to go in the world while still in contact with one’s roots: clawhammer boogie, strummed, bowed and percussive techniques, original compositions and traditional tunes, all cutting a path between old-time Appalachian music and its long-lost cousin, ecstatic minimal drone. In conversation with Rex and Casey’s own conceptions, with guitar, bass, mellowtone, keyboards, drums and percussion aboard, he continues to ride toward new vistas.

It’s been a long six years since these three players first appeared on Nathan’s 2018 album, ‘Plainly Mistaken’, a stretch made weird by the period of time in which social music couldn’t be played socially. But again, nothing ever really dies: the time since, experienced as individuals and as a band, informs everything about ‘Are Possible’’s multitudinous group sound. The details along the road that the band travelled to get here, where one riff blossomed into ten, then melted back down, and parts were added and subtracted and became each other in moments of new collective understanding.

Rex brought a rhythm to the table after drumming on buckets at work, Casey provided a bassline that redirected a previous jam, Nathan brought in a song he’d been messing with forever and they figured it out together. Their diversity of sources moves easily within the arrangements, rendering a far-ranging set of feels, from transcendental to new country funk to good ol’ jazz and the folk-rock - all of it drawn out exquisitely when they mixed at Electrical Audio in Chicago with the delicate hands of Cooper Crain upon the faders.

The Nathan Bowles Trio have done their due diligence, passing their music through time and space on their way to now; now, the real trip begins, as ‘Are Possible’ travels on, through you.

TRACK LISTING

Dappled
The Ternions
Our Air
Top Button
Gimme My Shit
Aims

...tick tock, rappa tap tap, glitch bloop ’n roll — here come ol’Wand back, they’re coming down slowly. The denser they get, it appears, the simpler they fly. And now . . . five years after a Laughing Matter, baby — who are “Wand” this time? With Vertigo, what hath Wand spawned?

It’s multichromatic, that’s for sure, but its too soon to tell, we’re too close to see. The way cells are replaced and all new again? That’s it. Now they are ten and all new again (see Ganglion Reef, 2014), but in the sample set of the time between — this time/the time of the quintet Wand of late, of Plum and Laughing Matter — they’ve undergone the complex -2+1 dimensional restructure, coming out a quartet (Evan Backer, Evan Burrows, Robbie Cody, Cory Hanson). Two original members, if you’re keeping a chart. We’re not judging you!

So, new-ish, in new ways anyway. But don’t . . . the new Wand’s built upon the exalted altars of old. There’s flashes of sentiment and tension, nudity and evasion, theatrical elevation, giant pieces chunked throughout alongside little bits of things. Allowing for slippage, it’s all one: the far horizon drawn in, nearer than ever before, allowing the chance for greater integration, if you stay open. And so they did. Vertigo is the sound of feet lost, regained, lost again, equilibrium in soft focus, a swaying feeling, more automatic and associative: in time, direct.

Determining to work backwards (or at least insideout) this time, Wand recorded everything in their own studio; pieces cut from improvisations and reshaped, writing from within the performance, without the woodshed. Unconsciously, in the shadow of themselves, and turning round and round (and round), they kept finding that empty space and playing what it implied. Everybody took on a new position in addition to the old one. It was intuitive, strangely ego-less . . . going somewhere they’d never been and not knowing what they were doing, but committing and recommitting, unafraid to eject in a constant positive forward momentum.

TRACK LISTING

1. Hangman
2. Curtain Call
3. Mistletoe
4. JJ
5. Smile
6. Lifeboat
7. High Time
8. Seaweed Head

The date was March 6th, 2023. Bill Callahan strode onto the stage at Chicago’s Thalia Hall, flanked by Matt Kinsey on guitar, Dustin Laurenzi on alto sax and Jim White on the kit. They all were feeling good, and it seemed like the crowd was also. But that wasn’t all. They had some special surprises planned... take it away, Bill....

“This is a live album that was taken from the tour for 'YTI⅃AƎЯ'. Songs tend to mutate after they’ve been recorded. These songs were mutating faster than usual. Like whatever happened to Bruce Banner in the lab - I knew these songs were about to get superpowers. As far as I was concerned, this change needed to be documented.

The best thing about documenting something is that it gives the creator permission to move on should they wish to move on. I usually prefer to move on.

These songs were recorded in Chicago, America’s heart. And at one of the best clubs in the country - I try to only work with venues that are not entangled with LiveNation/Ticketmaster. Thalia Hall, baby. Stay free.

The date was mid-point in the tour, so I knew we’d be as hot as we were
going to get. Not too green, not too brown.

There was the thought, 'let’s take this op to make it something special'.
So we took advantage of Chicago’s easily accessible players - we got
Nick Mazzarella to add alto sax to one song, and from the opening band, Pascal Kerong’A to sing on a song, and Nathaniel Ballinger on piano on one song - and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to invite Joshua Abrams and Lisa Alvarado to play on 'Natural Information'.

The hardest part of making the record was cutting songs out - it
could have been a triple album. But I don’t know, maybe the show should have been this short?”

- Bill Callahan

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: There are few artists with more live and recording experience under their belt than Bill Callahan, and 'Resucitate!' is a superb collection of some of the choice cuts from Callahan's performance Chicago in March '23. The band are in fine form, brilliant setlist and all presented in this gorgeous double LP or CD package for your enjoyment. Lovely!

TRACK LISTING

1. First Bird
2. Coyotes
3. Keep Some Steady
4. Friends Around
5. Partition
6. Drover
7. Pigeons
8. Everyway
9. Naked Souls
10. Natural
11. Information
12. Planets

A feverish essay of transcendent drumming: Chris’ solo approach, rooted in the exploration of elements of extended technique, sought another level, via possibilities facilitated by a self-made string drum! The Key (Became The Important Thing [& Then Just Faded Away]) brings his encompassing focus on free improvisation and noise into a granular fusion with acoustic experiments and hot-wired ideations of hard rock riffing and the post-punk sound.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
I Don’t Have Missions
Collapsed In Four Parts
Low Experience

Side B
Unlike An Empty Box
The Full-Measure Wash Down
Everything I Tried To Understand Wasn’t Understandable At All

Drag City are excited to present the first ever vinyl pressing of guitarist Lee Underwood’s undersung 1988 acoustic guitar opus, ‘California Sigh’.

Lee Underwood had been Tim Buckley’s stalwart, inspiring, accompanying and being inspired by Buckley as they both navigated a heady set of changes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then, he abruptly stopped working as a professional musician, leaving behind a body of work that, as noted by Eugene Chadbourne, was the work of “a loner, who didn’t quite march under any one flag... whose improvisations involved the level of sophisticated harmonic development one finds in jazz… floating as freely as Ornette Coleman.”

If, like Drag City, you ever wondered, “whatever became of that trippy picker from those Buckley records?” then you too missed ‘California Sigh’ when it first appeared in 1988. Then again, it was easy to miss a cassette-only private press release in the late 1980s - and highly likely that Lee’s acoustic guitar-based instrumentals were filed without proper distinction among the avalanche of New Age cassettes in that era.

So, 35 years later, yet still in time, train your ears on the meditations of ‘California Sigh’. As Byron Coley’s liner notes observe: “The music is guitar-based acoustic instrumental melodicism with a lovely tone and alternately ruminative and jazzy structuring. The playing is generally in the vein of William Ackerman and Alex de Grassi rather than progenitors like Basho and Fahey, although ‘Lady of the Streams’ does display a bit of a Fahey lilt at times. Throughout these pieces there are also flashes of single string runs straight out of the Django Reinhart playbook. But the overall mood is tranquil - reflecting the musical joys Underwood found when surrounded by nature.”

The tenor of the production is transcendent to be sure. It had been years since Lee had moved from LA to Northern California, years since he traded the work of writing and recording songs for an editorial position at Down Beat. With his guitar leading the way again, an expansive mood is evident throughout California Sigh. Additionally, Lee had new love in his life - the partnership of Sonia Crespi, whose warmth and inspiration shines through all the material. The playing of Chas Smith and Kevin Braheny Fortune, on pedal steel and soprano sax respectively, lend additional colours to Lee’s music on several songs, but it is largely the soulful depth of Lee’s guitar figures, limned by Steve Roach’s synthesizers and the Roach / Underwood coproduction, that give dynamic shape and elevation to Lee’s lovely cycle of songs. And now, with this remastered vinyl edition, the air around the instruments - both real and implied - and the full sonic impact of ‘California Sigh’ - alternately gentle and mighty, like the natural world that inspired it - is magnified incomparably.

In the years following the release of ‘California Sigh’, Lee wrote and recorded two solo piano CDs, ‘Phantom Light’ and ‘Gathering Light’. Additionally, he wrote ‘Blue Melody: Tim Buckley Remembered’, a memoir of their time together, as well as three books of poems, ‘Timewinds’ (2010), ‘Diamondfire’ (2016) and ‘Into Light’ (Poetic Matrix Press, 2021). He continues to live in Northern California.

California Sigh is “dedicated with love and respect” by Lee to his late wife, Sonia Crespi, for the friendship and inspiration she brought.

TRACK LISTING

Gentle Rain
Seaview
Portals Of The Heart
California Sigh
Lady Of The Streams
Venice, '68
Quietude Oasis
Little Desert Cat Feet
The Other Side Of Sunny
Midnight Blue
Aspen Trails

The Emmy-winning Comeback Kid himself comes back yet again with a blunt, brilliantly quotable stand-up special. 'Baby J' takes the form of a wide-ranging
conversation between John Mulaney, a kid in the balcony named Henry, and the rest of the sold-out crowd at Boston’s Symphony Hall. And now, you!

John dominates the chat, of course - and while his cautionary tales are a bit too convulsive to be functionally preventative, you probably aren’t here to be cautioned. So have at it!

TRACK LISTING

1. Miss America
2. Lost In New York
3. Star-Studded Intervention
4. Koala Bank Changing Station
5. Dr. Michael
6. A Call From Al Pacino
7. Baby J
8. John, John And John
9. Breaking Up With
10. Your Dealer
11. Mushing Metals
12. Hello Old Friend
13. A Wide Ranging Conversation

Like a bolt echoing back from the blue, We Have Dozens of Titles restrikes the iron of Gastr del Sol, plunging the listener (that’s us!) back into the maelstrom of their all-too-brief (-but-ultimately-long-enough-to-change-everything-incisively) passage of 1993-1998 via an assembly of previously uncollected studio recordings and beautifully captured unreleased live material.

Gastr del Sol’s music was of the transformative variety – or was it transfiguration they were up to? Or transmigration? Flux was key, to be sure. David Grubbs formed Gastr from the final lineup of Bastro; on Gastr’s del Sol’s debut, The Serpentine Similar, Grubbs, Bundy K. Brown and John McEntire downshifted from a thrashing electric outfit into a droning, acoustic-based one. Following this, the lineup shifted again, decisively – Brown and McEntire departed to focus on the project to be known as Tortoise, and Jim O’Rourke arrived, pairing with Grubbs to make a sequence of unpredictable leaps across genre and practical approach alike, over three LPs and a pair of EPs that threatened the passage of musical time as we knew it in the mid-90s.

We Have Dozens of Titles contains nearly an hour of previously unreleased live recordings, alongside another near-hour of studio recordings culled from previously uncollected singles, EPs, and compilations. At long last, vinyl purchasers will hear the full range of “The Harp Factory on Lake Street”, “Dead Cats in a Foghorn”, “Quietly Approaching” and “The Bells of St. Mary’s” for the first time EVER on vinyl – all of it, live and studio alike, lovingly mastered and remastered by Jim O’Rourke, and packaged in a three LP box set with a wicked Roman Signer image on its removable lid, interior printing on the box bottom and inner sleeves for each LP with performance credits for all the songs.

As much as Gastr del Sol’s albums showcase a group eminently at home in the studio, they were inclined to thoroughly reinvent their compositions in performance. While reviewing live tapes for this compilation, the studio versions of most things felt more and more definitive, with the exception of the live takes included here, which essay startling new qualities in pieces that have been in the public ear for several decades.

The majority of these live performances come from a miraculous find in the CBC archive – a broadcast-quality recording of Jim and David from the 1997 Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville. This was the last time they performed together as Gastr del Sol, during which several still-gestating Camoufleur pieces were presented in radically different forms and Jim played organ on a track from David’s first solo album, the concert-closing, band closing (and now album-closing) version of "Onion Orange”.

The studio recordings included were originally released by the Red Hot Organization, God Mountain, Table of the Elements, Sony Japan, Teenbeat and Drag City. Studios utilized in the making of the material were Idful Music Corporation, Kingsize Soundlab and steamroom. The extended company of players on these numbers includes Jeb Bishop, Bundy K. Brown, Steve Butters, Gene Coleman, Thymme Jones, Terri Kapsalis, John McEntire, Günter Müller, Bob Weston and Sue Wolf – a virtual “what’s who wha'?!?” of Chicago’s hothouse scene in those times.

We Have Dozens of Titles revisits the slow-burning incendiaries of Gastr del Sol, finding, once again and after so much time elapsed, another, further set of reinventions from a group who continues to change the way we hear music.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Seasons Reverse (live)
2. Quietly Approaching
3. Ursus Arctos Wonderfilis (live)
4. At Night And At Night
5. Dead Cats In A Foghorn
6. The Japanese Room At La Pagode
7. The Bells Of St. Mary’s
8. Blues Subtitled No Sense Of Wonder (live)
9. 20 Songs Less
10. Dictionary Of Handwriting (live)
11. The Harp Factory On Lake Street
12. Onion Orange (live)

Should the name Jim Rafferty sound a tad familiar, he is in fact the older brother of Gerry Rafferty, of ‘Baker Street’ and ‘Stuck In The Middle with You’ fame. As a songwriter, Jim had signed a solo deal with Decca in the late 1970s. With Gerry in the producer’s chair, and a crack team of the several of the same musicians whom Gerry later recruited for his hit album, ‘City To City’, Jim produced the album ‘Don’t Talk Back’, comprising the kind of sophisticated, melodic material typified, like his brother’s work, by strong emphasis on vocal harmonies - the popular style at end of the 1970s.

Decca went out of business concurrent with their release of Jim’s arguably superior second album, ‘Solid Logic’, produced by Martin Levan. Times were changing across the music business, and Jim, always seeking new challenges, continued to write interesting, idiosyncratic material. He signed a self-penned, nervy and minimalist new work ‘I See Red’, to Hit & Run publishing, which was picked up by Phil Collins for Abba star Frida’s solo album. The song’s outsider narrative and implied reggae rhythm, made somewhat cartoonishly explicit in Frida’s version, also found favour with a number of other artists, notably Clannad, whose album ‘Magical Ring’ included their near identical version of ‘I See Red’, and gained chart placing in the UK. The same song was subsequently covered by brother Gerry on his ‘Wing and A Prayer’ album.

The flipside of Jim’s ‘I See Red’ has its own cover history - ‘Fear Strikes Out’ first appeared on Ian Matthews’ 1984 LP, ‘Shook’. Matthews, a journeyman who’d once sung in Fairport Convention alongside Judy Dyble and Sandy Denny and later hit the charts several times as a solo act, roots his version firmly in Jim’s ineffable arrangement, which makes sense - but Jim’s version notches up the excitement brightly, showcasing sharp guitar and keyboard textures in the mix. And sounding more like a hit.

TRACK LISTING

1. I See Red
2. Fear Strikes Out

With Time is Glass, Six Organs of Admittance is captured once again in the intricate tangle of the fretboards, soaring in open skies above. Like lens flare cutting through the speakers; spiderwebs cracking the windshield that holds back all the onrushing reality. Blowing the dust away, cutting a new path for cognition. As is always endeavored.... After 20 years of living on the road in different places, Six Organs of Admittance had returned home to Humboldt County — a far country, to some, but still part of the world through which creatures of all kinds are moving through and contributing to. And some of them are human. Alone together — forming connection and exchange out of thought and expression — no different from the people on the other side of the Redwood Curtain. It was there, where Six Organs had long ago emerged, in the name of everything cycling, of circles that spiral concentrically and remain unbroken, the new music was conceived.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A startlingly focused and beautifully minimalistic recording of voice and guitar, showing the perfect juxtaposition of rhythmic guitar playing and soaring, swooning vocal work from Ben Chasny. An unhindered, unhurried gem.

TRACK LISTING

The Mission
Hephaestus
Slip Away
Pilar
Theophany Song
My Familiar
Spinning In A River
Summer’s Last Rays
New Year’s Song

Happy 20th birthday to ‘Family Album’, the third recording of Faun Fables and the first one released on Drag City.

These songs belong to sons and daughters, entwined and orphaned, domesticated and feral; to all the family vines unravelling from a ball of yarn.

In this family album, runaways graze the wild together, a mother finds her courage playing the piano, dogs become thieves and wolves, and a son is taken too soon. Fourteen-year-old nymphs sit dangerously at the crossroads, a younger brother tries to find his place, packs of girls defeat fear with a march, and the nightly adventures of the household mouse are spied upon.

Dawn McCarthy’s creative background was forged in oral tradition amidst a large musical family in Spokane, Washington; studying piano, music theatre, rock bands, guitar, folklore and ethnomusicology. Dawn cut her teeth as a singer and performer with various bands and cabarets in Madison, Wisconsin and New York City, most notably as yodeller with the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, who inspired her to want a gypsy life with a kindred spirit someday. Her focus took a pivotal turn in that direction in 1997 with a solo quest through the UK and Ireland and their bardic traditions; singing songs in clubs and homes, all the while undergoing a pastoral, psychological experience with the land. Upon her return to the States, a fateful meeting with Oakland, CA born-and-raised Nils Frykdahl (Sleepytime Gorilla Museum) moved McCarthy back to the West to begin a new creative collaboration in the thriving hills and art community of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Since 1999, Faun Fables have released six albums and performed their animist, otherworldly folk music across North America and Europe, with shows in Australia, New Zealand and Israel, as well. Dawn’s writing and voice (described by The New Yorker as “one of the more compelling instruments in contemporary music”) opens hearts and minds with a whisper to a rallying battle cry, further animated by Frykdahl’s adventurous musicality and vocals.
Dawn has written musical theatre performed by the Idyllwild Arts Academy, among others, and has lent her vocals to Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy on ‘The Letting Go’ and ‘What the Brothers Sang’. In 2022, Faun Fables debuted their family band, joined onstage by their daughters with vocals, percussion, keyboard and dance.

TRACK LISTING

1. Eyes Of A Bird
2. Poem, No. 2
3. A Mother
4. And A Piano
5. Lucy Belle
6. Joshua
7. Nop Of Time
8. Still Here
9. Preview
10. Higher
11. Carousel With
12. Madonnas
13. Rising Din
14. Fear March
15. Eternal
16. Mouse Song
17. Old And Light

‘Mother Twilight’ is the second Faun Fables album. It has since been noted by Scottish author R.J. Stewart as a work containing true artifacts of the oral underworld tradition. Dawn and Nils made a handassembled first pressing and peddled it to nearly every bar and rural hall across North America from 2001 to 2003. Drag City reissued the CD in 2004.

Things are glowing outside, enough to bring any sun worshiper in for the night. But you must remain outside and begin walking. It’ll prepare you for the night, which otherwise comes as a chilling surprise. If you pay attention this time, maybe you’ll understand why you’re becoming invisible. When your memory began, it wasn’t startling, wasn’t a mistake. It came out of an old, dark and familiar thing, like a storyteller, like Twilight… so save us from fear, mother, and tell your story.

Dawn McCarthy’s creative background was forged in oral tradition amidst a large musical family in Spokane, Washington; studying piano, music theatre, rock bands, guitar, folklore and ethnomusicology. Dawn cut her teeth as a singer and performer with various bands and cabarets in Madison, Wisconsin and New York City, most notably as yodeller with the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, who inspired her to want a gypsy life with a kindred spirit someday. Her focus took a pivotal turn in that direction in 1997 with a solo quest through the UK and Ireland and their bardic traditions; singing songs in clubs and homes, all the while undergoing a pastoral, psychological experience with the land. Upon her return to the States, a fateful meeting with Oakland, CA born-and-raised Nils Frykdahl (Sleepytime Gorilla Museum) moved McCarthy back to the West to begin a new creative collaboration in the thriving hills and art community of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Since 1999, Faun Fables have released six albums and performed their animist, otherworldly folk music across North America and Europe, with shows in Australia, New Zealand and Israel, as well. Dawn’s writing and voice (described by The New Yorker as “one of the more compelling instruments in contemporary music”) opens hearts and minds with a whisper to a rallying battle cry, further animated by Frykdahl’s adventurous musicality and vocals.

Dawn has written musical theatre performed by the Idyllwild Arts Academy, among others, and has lent her vocals to Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy on ‘The Letting Go’ and ‘What the Brothers Sang’. In 2022, Faun Fables debuted their family band, joined onstage by their daughters with vocals, percussion, keyboard and dance.

TRACK LISTING

1. Begin
2. Sleepwalker
3. Shadowsound
4. Hela
5. Traveller
6. Returning
7. Train
8. Beautiful Blade
9. Mother Twilight
10. Lightning Rods
11. Moth
12. Girl That
13. Said Goodbye
14. Washington State
15. Catch Me
16. Live Old

High Llamas present Hey Panda - a modern pop music/deep listening experience that could only issue forth from their personal quadrant of the galaxy. Hey Panda projects soulfully through an enervating abstract of today’s popular music; the sound of the Llamas’ stately melodies and expressive ditties laid open – blissfully shattered – with drums and vocals hitting different, burning sounds and contemporary production twists pulling the ear at every turn.

For the past few decades, High Llamas have trafficked in contemporary pop sounds directed toward the avant end of the spectrum as much as not. But here the message was clear. Llamas’ composer-in-residence Sean O’Hagan was determined to let go. Hey Panda does just that, with a set of tunes reflecting on multiple levels how definitions change over the course of a lifetime, radiating an optimism derived from the diverse conundrums of today.

Eight years since their last release, the pop musical Here Come The Rattling Trees, High Llamas have reinvented themselves again, mixing their peerless harmonic voice with what Sean regards as the “extraordinarily good” production sounds of today on Hey Panda.

Choosing not to look backward to former golden ages celebrated in earlier Llamas eras, Sean’s instead found himself opened up by the sounds of music brought into the house by his adult children and the sounds encountered at sessions for which he’s recently written arrangements. In addition to the more traditional contributions he made to The Coral’s Sea of Mirrors album, plus his score for the Safdie brothers’ 2022 film production, Funny Pages, Sean’s drawn great inspiration through working with Fryars, Rae Morris, King Krule, Pearl and The Oyster, while also soaking up the work of Tierra Whack and Chicago's Pivot Gang, and being cheered on from a distance by longtime admirer Tyler The Creator.

Thus, Sean’s producer procedural has evolved again, with upgrades first detected in his 2019 solo effort, Radum Calls, Radum Calls. With a cover of Billie Eilish’s “Wish You Were Gay” arranged for Bill Callahan and Bonnie Prince Billy’s Blind Date Party, along with his COVID-era solo single, “The Wild Are Welcome”, Sean has leveled up again and again, leading to the delirious revelations of Hey Panda.

Hey Panda’s wide reach is aided by two co-writes from Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, (who bonded with Sean over a shared love of gospel soul during writing sessions), guest vocals from Rae Morris and Sean’s daughter Livvy, production twists from Fryars and the stalwart, flexible presence of High Llamas.

For all of its sense of departure, Hey Panda is a movement in the High Llamas oeuvre that’s been a long time in development. Aspects of soul music were addressed at the time of Can Cladders; similarly, aspects of electronic dance music were in the mix in the late 90s, around the time of Cold and Bouncy. But nothing up to now has refocused the music of High Llamas so completely. Sharing the impulse of late-period Miles Davis and Quincy Jones, with further inspiration from Steve Lacy, SZA, Sault, No Name and Ezra Collective, among many others, Sean O’Hagan and High Llamas are living joyfully in the new and the now, with Hey Panda.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A constantly evolving, soulful collection of syncopated orchestration and flickering electronic indie songwriting. Seamlessly mixing lounge-jazz, folk and synth-pop into the mix, all topped with vocals both human and *otherwise*. Baffling, but always surprisingly smooth and accessible.

TRACK LISTING

Hey Panda
Fall Off The Mountain
Bade Amey
Sisters Friends (featuring Rae Morris)
How The Best Was Won (featuring Bonnie "Prince" Billy)
The Grade
Yoga Goat
Stone Cold Slow
Toriafan
Hungriest Man (featuring Bonnie "Prince" Billy)
The Water Moves
La Masse (featuring Fryars)

This is long overdue. I mean, looooooonnnnnng overdue. A solo album by Jim.

The trap kit - so straightforward, so mysterious. What’s inside those things? Air and light - from which century? Which continent? Which planet? Depending on how and when you hit them it can be a vibration sent through a prehistoric breath, particles of Saturn’s atmosphere, the dead, wet leaves you walked through on the way to the first day of school. These are the memories of the drums on this record. Infinite and personal. Editing each other as they muscle to the front or soft shoe to the shadow. Cymbals can override/cancel everything out - wipe your memory clear or make the memory clearer. Drums are the instrument where you can feel the presence of the player the most - the full body - and sense the thoughts of the player the most. The instrument with the most choices to be made sends out the most brainwaves. A bouquet of brainwaves is on this LP.

Jim oversees it all, surveys from the lost place we’re in, the void - the drumless song. We trust. We trust, Jim. His big green eyes search for the right tool (mallet, brush, etc), eyes that search you like you’re a song he wants to join, wants to see if he can add to or understand. Before humans, drums were playing - these drums. Genesis was a solo drum piece. After humans, these drums, this album.

Someone - the last man - is out in a spaceship at the edge of space. He plays a single chord on a synth to set time free from its bind and then lets go. This album sets time free, lets it frolic, lets it graze, lets it remember. This is a record of thoughts, memories, surgery. A deft surgical operation you may not even realize is happening as it’s happening but you’re back on your feet when it’s over. Memories refreshed. Did you really even listen to it? Bill Callahan, November 2023

TRACK LISTING

1. Curtains
2. Percussion Build
3. Marketplace
4. Soft Material
5. St. Francis Place Set Up
6. Uncoverup
7. Walking The Block
8. Jully
9. Long Assemblage
10. Names Make The Name
11. No/Know Now
12. Stationary Figure
13. Here Comes

A fifteen song cycle that takes a journey to the center of the self. Ty’s been on this kind of trip before, so he’s souped up a vehicle that’s all his own – a sophisticated machine – to take us there this time. The conception of Three Bells arcs, rainbow-like, into a land nearly beyond songs – but inside of them, Ty relentlessly pushes the walls further and further in his writing and playing to cast light into the most opaque depths.

Ty Segall follows 2022’s acoustic introspection opus “Hello, Hi” with a deeper, wilder journey to the center of the self. With Three Bells, he’s created a set of his most ambitious, elastic songs, using his musical vocabulary with ever-increasing sophistication. It’s an obsessive quest for an expression that answers back to the riptide always pulling him subconsciously into the depths. Questions we all ask in our own private mirrors are faced down here — and regardless of what the mysterious “Three Bells” mean in the context of the album’s libretto, you can be assured that Ty’s ringing them for himself, and for the rest of us in turn.

It’s a growing up and out of your head parable, but the farther out you get, the farther in you go. The two-headed suggestion of 2012’s Twins has grown ever more complex, as the outside/inside world of perception dissolves into a greater world of the senses — all six or seven of them! Since Ty deals in sounds, Three Bells rings with them most of all: sounds signaling the next phase, ringing to keep you stuck, or to set you free, with guitars like voices, questioning and answering the others in their turn.

Since 2008, the singer/guitarist/puzzled panther we call Ty Segall has played out his hunger to be free over a dozen solo LPs and a series of other-named projects. In his music, freedom has taken the form of a rippling eclecticism in songs and production sounds, all of them conversing from album to album in a mad diversity of voices. Across the discograverse, 2014’s Manipulator and 2018’s Freedom’s Goblin precede Three Bells in double-album epicity, each unfurling its own multivarious tapestry in an atmosphere of gleeful octophenia, as Ty throws everything against the wall, delighting in how much he can stick there. With all fifteen songs brimming with perspectives, shape-shifting incessantly, not even waiting for a new song to work into the next idea, Three Bells steps into the shoes of both his previous doubles at the same time, designing finally to do the extended format justice.

The acoustic songs of “Hello, Hi” had been a blast of fresh air; wanting another hit of that sweet air, Ty recognized that his body was craving to play the drums. This was a key that let him into the album — the songwriting happening on both guitar and drums. As the songs emerged, Ty pushed them out farther and farther compositionally, challenging the way they’d be played, then playing much of Three Bells in conversation with himself — a decision that further elevates the album’s conception.

But you don’t get outside/inside all on your own — for Three Bells, Ty and Denée Segall collaborated on five of the songs. In Ty’s world, Denée forms the second self outside his self. And these selves radiate out into the world through other selves. Co-producer Cooper Crain, whose contributions to Harmonizer and “Hello, Hi” were deep, engineered and mixed most of the album, again bringing his individual vision into the process. Finally, some of the songs as written needed the kind of playing that Ty couldn’t get alone. On some numbers, Emmett Kelly’s bass parts not only addressed that need, but inspired the way the songs eventually went down. So it was when the Freedom Band was called in to play; their contributions transformed the material.

Three Bells kind of goes beyond songs. The fifteen of them work together as a mosaic, creating the larger work at the same time as they stand on their own. Composing the album as a piece, Ty formed certain chord shapes over and over again, making thematic material that each song moves through in its own way, building a claustrophobic/paranoia vibe, cycling bold thrusts forward into ego deaths, the one-step-forward, two-steps-back patterns framing an overriding ask: what we can do to get past the back-and-forth conversation, to arrive at a place of acceptance.

Three Bells takes Ty Segall’s trips so much deeper and farther than they’ve gone befor — a masterpiece of personal expression, expressed through words, music and production, parabolically addressing malaise with compassion in a flowing, unstoppable hour-plus of intoxicating sound.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: There's little I can say as a non-expert of Ty Segall for those of you who've heard Ty Segall before. One of the most innovative, prolific voices in blazing, garage rock and/or roll returns and it's as incendiary as you'd imagine. A masterclass in balance and heft.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Bell
2. Void
3. I Hear
4. Hi Dee Dee
5. My Best Friend
6. Reflections
7. Move
8. Eggman
9. My Room
10. Watcher
11. Repetition
12. To You
13. Wait
14. Denée
15. What Can We Do

Cylene II is the new materialization of the collaboration between François J. Bonnet & Stephen O'Malley, initiated in 2018 and continued without interruption since then, taking form in a myriad of contexts ranging from common practice to recording sessions, concerts and tours.

Cylene II bears witness to these different contexts, offering a multifaceted sound signature developed on different occasions (artist residencies in La Becque, Switzerland and Modena, Italy, live performance excerpts, a studio session at INA-GRM Studios in Paris).

The epic opening track "Four Rays (Anti Divide)" welcomes, for the first time, other musicians — in this case a wind quintet — expanding the duo's sonic palette without betraying the fundamental component of their music, namely the driving of sonic energy. Elsewhere, Bonnet and O'Malley propel the energy between themselves, extending the singular climate that has characterized their musical development over the past five years. Among their minimal presentation of tones and resonances, as glacial harmonic intersections slowly elevate with massive physicality to an orchestral degree, new refinements become evident: the music's relationship to silence, and a brightening of the fine metallic edge glowing at its core.

For the listener, Cylene II is a sound that reaches from the deep and scales up to the far firmament in its careful motion, drawing emotions viscerally from the chest, giving rise to the suggestibility of the soul. A séance of sorts for all who witness it, whether playing or listening.

TRACK LISTING

1. Four Rays (Anti Divide)
2. Rainbows
3. Vulcani Di Fango
4. Ghosts Of Precognition
5. Troisième Noire
6. La Ronde

Prison is a state of mind, an experience, a loose collective, a band, a jam band and a bunch of psychedelic dudes who aren’t your average bunch of jambanders.

The only way to really get it is to go to Prison - and if you’re not from greater NYC and haven’t showed up at any of the shows, here’s your best bet: their breakout album, ‘Upstate’. And what a breakout. So high, you can’t get under it; so wide, you can’t get over it. How wide? Every song has two titles, that’s how wide. And almost everybody sings, all the time. That wide.

Sure, you can break down the numbers - five guys, five songs and four sides of vinyl in one gatefold sleeve - but that won’t get you ‘Upstate’, either. Prison is the sound of everybody in the room figuring out where to go, individually and collectively. As they go through it, the meaning changes, the destination changes, the words mean something different. It’s meaning and no meaning, rising and falling, sinking and flying on the back of something massive cacophonized by three guitars, four vocals, a bass and drums. A lot of information bouncing around and enough time to really get you out of yourself.

The Prison population changes with the seasons, and during the season this album was recorded, Sarim Al- Rawi, Mike Fellows, Sam Jayne, Matt Lilly and Paul Major were in Prison. Sarim you might know from Liquor Store, Mike’s made a bunch of scenes and records as Mighty Flashlight, Sam, who passed away in 2020 (RIP) was in Love as Laughter, and Paul Major you know from Endless Boogie, who Matt had roadied for, and, despite being “just a skateboarder who loves music” with no previous experience on the drums, he and Sarim inaugurated the Prison experience seven years ago. Since then, it just fell together, and it keeps doing so. A free thing called Prison.

TRACK LISTING

Hold The Building Up / The Prison Within
Hold ‘em Up / Comin’ Down On Me
Low Hangin’ Disco Ball / So Alone
I Always Get What I Want / Playin’ Pool With The Planets
Destroy / Cookin’ With Heat

Emil Amos was originally commissioned by the legendary KPM music library to make this music for use in television and film. But after the executive overseeing their experimental wing exited the company, Emil brought ‘Zone Black’ to Drag City and remixed it into a proper full-length album. While the record was originally inspired by old school 1970s television music, like the grim, descending riffs that took us to commercial as the running back strained in anguish for the ball in slo-mo, it became a genuine attempt to reach towards a new kind of library music.

Emil (Grails, OM and podcaster supreme) carves out a much more personal interpretation of what we think of as ‘music for television’ with ‘Zone Black’. Taking classic, dark pieces that he grew up with as inspiration, like the ‘Lonely Man Theme’ from the original ‘Hulk’ TV series, he fantasized an alternate environment where composers were allowed to explore more extreme states of mind, while on much witchier drugs, fully separating library music from its outmoded commercial constraints. Imagine Brian Eno recording ‘Another Green World’ equipped with Madlib’s gear and a much darker sense of humour, or Kafka creating ‘The Castle’ with a Juno keyboard and sampler instead.

In the spirit of classic synth-based soundtracks like ‘Firestarter’ or ‘Midnight Express’, the instruments narrate the experience. Urban landscapes in noirish chiaroscuro, fatal encounters unfurling beneath the persistent glow of riot lights, last-ditch meetings in pre-dawn discotheques, all evoked with synths, harpsichords and mellotrons drifting over drum machines and the arachnoid radiation of FX disappearing up into the darkness. Every track illuminates a different corridor of Emil’s brain, but AE Paterra and Steve Moore of ZOMBI periodically step in to contribute sax solos and drum beats to amp the coloration up.

‘Zone Black’ is a fully inhabitable world, its episodic narrative divided into an improbable balance between morbid, ambient anthems and insouciant hip-hop instrumentals. Emil hadn’t heard it done quite this way before, so he took it upon himself to make the sound real. And if you don’t hear it in the next, big horror feature, it’ll make great mood music for tripping in the bathtub while dreaming of a new horizon of music to take drugs to. Listening to Emil Amos’

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: I'm a huge fan of Emil : Grails, Om, Lilacs & Champagne,
Holy Sons, the list goes on. What's immediately clear about 'Zone Black' is that he's taken influence from each one of his projects, the soaring opium-den majesty of BTP-era Grails or the jagged sex-funk chug of L&C and perfectly drawn them together into a wonderfully breath-taking whole, a steamy juxtaposition of cut-up samples and triumphant organic instrumentation. Ace.

TRACK LISTING

Moving Target
Theme From A Personal
Prison
Zone Black
Bad Night At Cowboys
Personal Prison II
Red Palms
Jealous Gods
Interloper #1
Zone Bleu
Static Mist
Static Mist II
Realistic #1
Blue Palms

O’Rourke’s process – sourcing resonant sounds to be enmeshed together into a music that supersedes their resident parts – makes a fitting soundtrack for Kyle Armstrong’s “prairie gothic” tale of down-on-the-farm horror way up north in Canada. His minimalist score inhabits the wide open, big sky landscape, flowing into suddenly-deep (and opaque) emotional waters, then panning out to a chilly omniscient remove. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Go Spend Some Time With Your Kids
2. Wasn’t There Last Night
3. He’s Only Got One Oar In The Water
4. That’s Not How The World Works
5. A Man’s Mind Will Play Tricks On Him
6. Here Is Where I Seem To Be / The Good Lord Doesn’t Need Paperwork
7. You Have No Idea What I Want
8. One Way Or Another I’m Gone

Matt Espy is an American drummer and percussionist. Born in Dayton, Ohio, he spent his youth playing every genre of music he could find, playing out in clubs starting at age 14 and launching his touring career at 18. He moved to Chicago in 1996 and continued his journey playing rock, avant-garde, jazz, and performance art pieces. He’s played drums for a number of groups and charismatic individuals, including Atombombpocketknife, Duke Special and The Mountain Goats. Over the past decade, he’s found his home with Dead Rider, also on Drag City.

‘Hawksworth’ is Matt’s first solo adventure. In the field of solo drumming albums, it’s an avian psychedelic percussion trip all of its own. A dialogue between birds, electronics, and drums, ‘Hawksworth’ operates along precise degrees in the vastness that exists between the diverse poles of Terry Riley and Martin Denny. It captures one particularly memorable morning walk from long ago, a time immemorial in Matt’s life. In this new musical rendering, that fateful morning is ridden with wormholes throughout the piece, like hyperspace links that travel to motifs from his 30-plus years music career with every step along the way.

The inspiration for the album came to Matt all at once a couple of years back. It was early pandemic times, and the world outside his home felt drained of people, which brought the sounds of the world without people to his attention. It took a while for the impact of that to settle in. One day, while, naturally, listening to music, he heard a pop song employing the barking of a dog as percussion, and sat up with a start. Was it real, or? Like a bolt from the blue, the sonic and the visual design for ‘Hawksworth’ came whole cloth, completely evident to him in that moment. It was done, and all it needed now was to be executed.

Matt started with the birds, locating a variety of hi-definition free source samples of their song. He chopped and scattered them into a new state of nature, collapsing the hemispheres and the regions within, to allow the birds of all nations the freedom to flock together. Once the editing work was done, drumming to this sound was almost simple compared to that process. He brought forward some licks - perennials - and other things worked up over time that had or hadn’t found a place with the different bands he’d been in, with room allowed for improvisation. And for Matt, drums were the only way to fly.

Working at the studio of Dead Rider frontman Todd Rittmann, Matt found his happy place. ‘Hawksworth’ comments upon a life in music as a space where the firmament is ever vaulting above our head, and Matt uses the world we too often take for granted - the one we live in - as a means to get back to the sky.

TRACK LISTING

Robin Throated Sparrow
Loon
Dexlark
Grey Winged Blackbird
Thrushwren

2023 marks the twenty-eighth year of Suarasama; it is also the first year for this reissue of their 2013 masterpiece, ‘Timeline’.

Irwansyah Harahap and Rithaony Hutajulu, Ethnomusicology lecturers at University of Sumatera Utara, founded Suarasama in 1995 after graduating from the University of Washington Ethnomusicology program. Their music, as expressed on both ‘Timeline’ and ‘Fajar Di Atas Awan’ (first issued in 1998, reissued by Drag City in 2008) is hypnotic and joyful, progressing ancient North Sumatran music concepts while referencing the music of adjacent ethnic traditions. ‘Dukkha’, for example, was written combining Mandailing and Eastern European musical inspirations. Playing this song on African jembe, Indian sruti box and a European lute known as the mandolin, Suarasama instigate a musical synesthesia in the listener that may honestly earn and truly deserve the title of ‘world music’.

Throughout ‘Timeline’, this is largely due to Irwansyah Harahap’s master playing on a variety of stringed instruments, including acoustic guitars, Malaysian gambus, mandolin, and an invention of his own design, the saz-guitar. Suarasama’s spirit and intention is further elevated by Rithaony Hutajulu’s vocals, as well as the skilled rhythm playing of Muhammad Amin and Horas Panjaitan, with additional percussion and singing from several others. The sound of Suarasama is the sound of people engaged in a deeply spiritual, constantly moving recital in open space.

Suarasama’s conception of ‘Timeline’ was a multifaceted one from the start. It grew from the concept of hemiola, a metric rhythmic structure involving the juxtaposition of a 2-beat time signature upon 3-beat time within the same line. The song ‘Timeline’ itself addresses the history of musical lutes around the world as a means of debuting their custom-made lute, the aforementioned saz-guitar.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, a ‘timeline’ charts the passage of time, and therefore references Suarasama’s musical path over the years of their existence. This is especially significant since founder and leader Irwansyah Harahap passed away in 2021 at the age of 60. As difficult as this loss is for his family, friends and fans alike, the reissue of ‘Timeline’ is seen as a celebration of the vitality and importance of his music career and journey. As a professor, he taught his students about the qualities of North Sumatran traditional music and their relationship to other traditional musics of the world; with the music of Suarasama, he demonstrated the same to listeners across the planet. He worked to preserve the music and the instruments as well, such as the traditional Sumatran taganing, a five-piece set of tuned drums, and hasapi, a lute of the Toba Batak people of North Sumatra. After Irwansyah’s passing, Ritha’s daughter Niesya said that he had always wanted their music studio Rumah Musik Suarasama, in Simpang Selayang, Medan Tuntungan, North Sumatra, to be a centre for music preservation. This dedication to the music was acknowledged in his lifetime through several awards and fellowships around the world, including a recognition from the Ministry of Culture and Education of Indonesia as the pioneer of the World Music genre in Indonesia.

Suarasama mourn the loss of their leader, Irwansyah Harahap, and grieve his passing. They intend to continue his legacy and spread his music to the world. As shall we - with the eternally resonant music of ‘Timeline’, crossing as many borders as possible, to bring Suarasama’s world music to all the people, everywhere.

TRACK LISTING

1. Untukmu Yang Berperang
2. Dukkha
3. Timeline
4. Sea Fish
5. Awesome
6. Journey
7. Kita Berbagi (We Share)

“And we’re coming out of dreams / And we’re coming back to dreams” is the first thing you hear Bill say as you remake your acquaintance on YTI⅃AƎЯ. Right out the gate, he’s standing in two places at once: meeting up with old friends behind the scenes and encountering them on the record, finding himself coming round the bend and then again as someone else on down the line. Like the character actor he played on Gold Record, writing stories about other people, telling jokes about everyone, and in singing them, becoming the songs.

From the beautiful to the jarring, intrepid explorer Callahan charts a passage through all kinds of territory, pitting dreams of dreams against dreams of reality. When he makes it back to us, his old friends 'n acquaintances, we are reminded how much of a world it can be out there - and in here as well, where we live everyday.

TRACK LISTING

First Bird
Everyway
Bowevil
Partition
Lily
Naked Souls
Coyotes
Drainface
Natural Information
The Horse
Planets
Last One At The Party

A sunny night from July of 2022 as “Hello, Hi” was just about to drop! Ty and Emmett staged a spontaneous acoustic show at a Highland Park clothing boutique, in advance of the album release shows at LA’s mighty Teragram Ballroom. With the packed crowd drawing magnetically toward the players, their performance elevates to the roof, intimate in nature but epic in response to the audience’s open enthusiasm.

TRACK LISTING

Hello, Hi
Don't Lie
Blue
Saturday Pt. 2
Distraction

First thought, best thought. Until the next thought: a guiding principle for No Age in the 16ish years they’ve been around. Constantly responding to their own streams of consciousness with reductive flexibility, they’ve taken the basic duo of guitar and drums with vocals WAY farther than anyone listening in halcyon Weirdo Rippers days could have guessed. Expounding on those larval possibilities, they’ve zig-zagged in serpentine precision, in and out of the teeth of the wringer — ranging outside and back in again, as befits the present thought. And now, six albums into it, these principles have led them to make People Helping People. Composed in their studio of ten years in the “pre pandemic” times, then an eviction from said space, and finished deep in the midst at their new basecamp: Randy’s Garage.

It starts with an instrumental, too. First counter-intuition, best counter intuition! Nearly five minutes prelude Dean’s debut vocal interjection — a zoom in from the upper atmosphere, Randy’s guitar clouds pulsing with radiation, paced by spare, percussive accents. When the first song with singing (“Compact Flashes”) bounces in on an insane synthetic beat, the only recognizable sound of No Age is a sputtering of enchanted clicks and creaks — muted guitar strings and drumkit rattlings that cycle for a full minute before voice song and snare fall into place.

This is the sound of People Helping People: No Age, deep in the lab, scraping available nuclii together to see what new compound they find next. Erasing the starting points, reordering the pieces and beginning anew. It’s an everyday mindset — and as the first No Age album recorded entirely by No Age, People Helping People is a broadcast of entirely lived-in proportions.

Side one ricochets expertly back and forth between magisterial instrumentals and sing-song forms cut up on the mixing desk, as with the undeniable hitness of “Plastic (You Want It)”, winningly rewired to MIDI-mangled beat squelches. They don’t really land on a straight up punk-style riff until it’s almost time to flip the side, and even once they’ve got off on a run of rockers on side B, their aesthetic choices continuously reframe the norms, enhancing their inherent power. People Helping People finds their disparate desires operating in perfect sync; prolegomenic weirdness fused immaculately to classic rock propulsion, transforming the energy pouring out from their hands and feet with electronics.

Dean’s lyrics are like pieces taken off the belt at the factory and put together into a John Chamberlin-esque sculpture, meant to sit out in the rain. Randy’s guitars, collaged into arrangements that reflect, again, boundless curiosity and exquisite restraint. This is People Helping People: unpretentious, suspicious, inviting, confident, left field. The most accurate display of the No Age ethos put to record. Yet!

No Age’s ethos sings to us from beyond the clouds, with words and without, a conceptual boost to everyone helping everyone. Ensconced in Randy’s Garage without a clock to spit on ‘em, Dean and Randy composted drums and guitar and life on planet earth into a stream of miniatures, vignettes and reembodied images – an infinity of hits.

TRACK LISTING

You’re Cooked
Compact Flashes
Fruit Bat Blunder
Plastic (You Want It)
Interdependence
Violence
Flutter Freer
Rush To The Pond
Slow Motion Shadow
Blueberry Barefoot
Tripped Out Before Scott
Heavenly
Andy Helping Andy

‘Amorpha’, a side-long shower of synthetic bells and bass, as patterns interlock and repeat and the beat within the bar lines shifts constantly, forms a new, latest miniature of infinity. You flip it, and ‘Geomancy’ resets you, starting anew, with heavy drift and drone leading into a space of shorter broken lines and Middle Eastern tonalities, that roll back into ether again - new spaces, but mysteriously consonant with the vibe.

‘Bajascillators’ arrives almost five years since their last official fulllength, 2017’s ‘Bajas Fresh’. In the eight years prior to ‘Bajas Fresh’, Bitchin Bajas issued seven albums, plus cassettes, EPs, singles… wave after wave of analogue synth tones and zones extending into a stratospheric arc. Each release its own headspace, shape and timbre, each one sliding naturally into their implacable, eternal gene pool.

Following the flow, always, the Bajas went ever-deeper-and-higher on these records, whether making soundtracks or collaborating with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, using only fortune cookie fortunes as a libretto. Plus engagement, with a steady stream of shows and tours around the world; live re-airings and expansions of the space captured in their records as they continued to grow and flow - all the way through, really, to the present moment.

Plus, there have been releases since 2017 - a split 12”, a 7” single, digital track release and two ‘Cuts’ cassettes, plus the allcovers cassette release ‘Switched On Ra’. But the overall number of releases, plus the five years between long players, implies a potential distance between phases, a new line in the sand. The sound of Bajascillators bear this out. How couldn’t it? Compared to 2017, this is a different world.

Mastered directly from half-inch analogue tape, ‘Bajascillators’ floats transparently from the speakers, its expansive grooves gathering resonance and building momentum over the four sides, from genesis to re-conclusion, cascading ecstatically. The elastic magic of time at its brightest. As the world keeps turning, so too do Bitchin Bajas, in the same unknowable way. You can’t explain it - just keep turning.

TRACK LISTING

Amorpha
Geomancy
World B. Free
Quakenbrück

The man in the tree has a guitar, he’s gonna sing. But the sun shining through the branches— are those rays yellow or hazy gray? What day is today? When are you not going to feel this way again? “Hello, Hi”: welcome in to a new room to play the styles and feels that lie under Ty Segall’s fingers, easing fresh air into acoustic space with an assortment of love songs flowering in righteous unconsciousness. Plaintive and wistful, but unafraid. Like rain washing away yesterday, “Hello, Hi” pushes open the door, inviting the new to pass through all the old shades and degrees of hot and cold. Dark paths turn off abruptly into absurd darkness, then wind back through the broken rocks, ecstatic again.

Absurdity again. It happens everyday. “Hello, Hi” is expansively rendered by Ty, mostly by himself, at home. The isolation suits the songs: you’re only ever as “at home” as you are with yourself in the mirror. Ty’s acoustic and electric guitars and vocal harmonies layer self upon self, forming a spiny backbone for the album. Textures at once gentle and dissonant root the songs as they make their move: melodic arcs convulsing in doubt and bliss and rage. Busting out of the endless gridlock into open space, these spirits pass on through. “Hello, Hi”’s flickering awakening to this trip: the opening three tracks’ train of sweet and salty reflections, before the abrupt crunch of the title track electrifies the senses. Good morning’s turned to good mourning in nothing flat, but there’s still a way up from the doldrums, to try again. Why can’t it be just as simple as “Hello, Hi”? What to do with yourself when love triggers loathing? How many more times do you have to go back there again?

Pulling at the scratchy wool threads of an old sweater favored for warmth, comfort, protection, rejection, denial, blindness etc, Ty Segall dives from a clear, open sky, down through the marine layer and the shimmering waves of all the years. Radiating from the same mind fields as Goodbye Bread and Sleeper, mixed with shard edges of contrast and contradiction from things like Freedom’s Goblin, Manipulator, and First Taste, “Hello, Hi” is Ty’s most relaxed and complete production to date, an ebb-and flow fusion of words and music offering abstraction and acceptance as it wrestles itself through a fucked-up time. Your life and what you make of it — throughout “Hello, Hi,” Ty Segall charts a passage through its enduring tangles honestly, with clarity and confusion.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: It's clear that Ty Segall have always been, and always will be one of the most propulsive and groundbreaking forces in modern music. 'Hello, Hi' looks to continue this streak of excellence, both wildly inventive and highly intricate, it's a riff-lovers dream.

TRACK LISTING

1. Good Morning
2. Cement
3. Over
4. Hello, Hi
5. Blue
6. Looking At You
7. Don't Lie
8. Saturday Pt.1
9. Saturday Pt.2
10. Distraction

Drag City grandly presents Whirlybird (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), featuring all-new music by Ty Segall, created for Matt Yoka’s compelling new documentary.

Released to great acclaim in Summer 2021, Whirlybird tells the story of Zoey Tur and Marika Gerrard, former partners and founders of the Los Angeles News Service, and deftly tracks their extraordinary and often-reckless pursuit of breaking news throughout the 80s and 90s — a time in which they pioneered the use of a helicopter to report on Los Angeles at its most chaotic, capturing historical moments like the 1992 riots and the O.J. Simpson slow speed pursuit.

Through striking interviews and one-of-a-kind archival footage,Yoka’s documentary expertly tells the story of Zoey and Marika’s unraveling marriage as they singlehandededly changed broadcast news forever. These two arcs intertwine to create an electric view of the encroaching intensities of that era, when the 24-hour news cycle first rose up to dominate our national consciousness.

Ty Segall has previously scored scenes and interstitial bits for film and video things here and there — but this is his first full-on feature film score, a work done in collaboration with the director, whose friendship and creative partnership with Ty has grown over a decade-plus of music videos and other projects. Working off notes and feels from Matt and responding to the images and story on screen, Ty crafted some of his most creative arrangements to date, using synth, drum machine, Wurlitzer keyboard, guitars, drums and percussion (plus saxes played by Mikal Cronin, who also cowrote the title track with Ty) to articulate a multitude of tones running through the film. For a shape-shifter like Ty, this apex of tone color is no mean feat, an achievement further highlighted by the full set of pieces. Rather than simply throw a bunch of songs-with-singing at the project, Ty’s score perfectly epitomizes the film’s ethos, providing an instrumental counterpart that dialogues with and helps frame the film’s provocative themes and images.

As both Matt and Ty are natives to the Southern Californian milieu, particularly the era Whirlybird depicts, their collaboration involved a journey through their past. In realizing the music, they revisited their own Los Angeles awakenings, adding another personal layer to the deeply felt meditations and elegies sighted by the remarkable Whirlybird — now an equally thrilling counterpart to be experienced through the original soundtrack.

TRACK LISTING

1. Whirlybird
2. First Date
3. Los Angeles News Service
4. Getting The Story
5. Sky Duo
6. Lawrence Welk III
7. First Pursuit
8. 1992
9. High
10. News Junkies
11. Story Of The Century
12. Whirly Suite
13. Last Flight

It was November 2018 that Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin met at Studio Rymden, in a quiet, pretty suburban district of Stockholm, to make the music that became ‘Ghosted’. They can’t remember exactly when it was made because that time - the when and where that it was recorded - doesn’t really matter anymore. Now the music of ‘Ghosted’ exists in the intention of a shared moment of playing, a clearly delineated time, put forth with a steady flow of small details on bass, guitar and drums, in a remarkable display of rhythmic flexibility within a minimal framework.

Oren and Johan have met many times onstage and off since 2003, with several duo recordings to their credit, as well as additional encounters in the group Fire! with Mats Gustafsson and drummer Andreas Werliin. A while back, Oren and Johan decided to reconvene in the studio for a furthering of the thought process that they’d come to on the second Ambarchi / Berthling collaboration, 2015’s ‘Tongue Tied’. As Andreas had mixed that session, it felt right to have him on kit - he’d already been intimately involved in the process.

The music they all play together in Fire! is, to put it mildly, loud. This session, they sensed an opportunity to explore different dynamics - to tap, perhaps, a shared inner ECM space. Studio Rymden sits on an upper floor of the building it’s located in, and the light coming through the windows was pleasant on that day. They set up, picked out some amps (including the best-sounding Leslie speaker Oren’s ever heard) and got started.

Rooting in the rich tonality and repeating figures of Johan’s acoustic (and sometimes electric) bass, the four tracks that make up ‘Ghosted’ act as variations on a theme, unspooling continuously over the course of 39 minutes with the terse flow of krautrock jams - closely observed percussive riffs and repetitions that build continuously with subtle shifts as they move forward, with the small details flying expansively in and out across the stereo spectrum. Oren’s guitar often sounds with an organ-like tone, with notes of fire and glass wafting out over the percolation and permutation in Johan and Andreas’ rhythms. These men have been playing long enough to, without any real words, shape their improvisations with short- and long-term goals.

Performances that day ranged from almost five minutes to almost sixteen. With an eye toward further expansion, they’d invited the legendary Swedish reed player Christer Bothén, whose knowledge of the guimbri and donso n’goni was incisively shared with the great Don Cherry some fifty years ago. Christer plays donso n’goni on the first track, and his parts sync like cogs in a watch, revolving in fluid coordination with Oren, Johan and Andreas.

Mixed and mastered by Joe Talia at Good Mixture, Berlin, ‘Ghosted’ highlights the intimate dialogue between players, as well as the careful curation of space between them. It is rare to think of silence in relation to music where everyone is constantly playing - and yet, listening to this, we do.

Once it was all done, Pål Dybwik’s misty, nocturnal basketball court images seemed to embody the spirit of the album, while once more steering it in a direction that nobody had stopped to imagine, because this was just something in the air.

TRACK LISTING

I
II
III
IV

The Blind Date Party hosted by Bill Callahan and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and featuring AZITA, Matt Sweeney, Alasdair Roberts, Matt Kinsey, Sean O’Hagan, Bill MacKay, George Xylouris, Dead Rider, David Pajo, Mick Turner, Meg Baird, Ty Segall, Emmett Kelly, Cory Hanson, Six Organs of Admittance, David Grubbs, Cassie Berman, Cooper Crain and Sir Richard Bishop happened online in the fall and winter of ’20–’21 — but the party planning dated back to the spring of 2020. Stuck at home, with no gigs in the foreseeable future, Bill, Bonnie and Drag City needed an outreach program to keep themselves busy, not to mention sane. In the absence of any company or anything on the calendar, playing songs they loved was an idea; playing with people they loved, the desire. And making it fun — so pairing someone with someone else having no say in the matter, the essence of the blind date, was the plan. Favorite songs were chose; players from around the Drag City galaxy were messaged. Pretty soon, songs were flying back and forth — music in the air!

And thus, they were entertained throughout the summer of 2020, when so much else in the world seemed so completely wrong. By the fall, the songs started to appear online: Bill and Bonnie singing a song by someone they loved and admired; each song cut by another another artist they loved and admired, then sent to Bill and Bonny to provide the finishing touches. The spotlight pointed in every direction each week: toward the singers and writers who’d originally played the songs (Yusuf Islam, Hank Williams Jr., Dave Rich, The Other

Years, Billie Eilish, Steely Dan, Lou Reed, Bill Callahan, Jerry Jeff Walker, Robert Wyatt, Lowell George, Johnnie Frierson, Air Supply, Will Oldham, Leonard Cohen, David Berman, Iggy Pop and John Prine), toward their featured collaborators, the artists whose artwork adorned each digital single and videos made by still more collaborators. And you, the listener.

Like the best parties, it turned out to be everything and more than they’d even hoped for. So many more people were involved in the process that we can get on the page here. Suffice to say, making records over the years has required a broad sense of community and an always-surprising mix of independence and unity, inspiration and utility. Some of our best memories are those where as many of our folks as as possible were together in one place at one time. In those moments, it was just a great thing just to be there. And with others looking in . . . this was a joy one could only be infinitely lucky to feel and to take for granted, as well.

The Blind Date Party was one of these, maybe the most improbable one yet. It’s for everyone who’s here and it’s in the name of everyone who’s gone but will never go and will always live with us here. This album will too.

And thus, we are entertained.

STAFF COMMENTS

Darryl says: Combining the best elements of each others talents 'Blind Date Party' finds Bill and Will in fabulous form. Mellow, dark, country-folk laments to snuggle up to during the cold winter months.

TRACK LISTING

A
The Blackness Of The Night (feat. Azita)
OD'd In Denver (feat. Matt Sweeney)
I've Made Up My Mind (feat. Alasdair Roberts)
Red-Tailed Hawk (feat. Matt Kinsey)
Wish You Were Gay (feat. Sean O'Hagan)
Our Anniversary (feat. Dead Rider)
B
Rooftop Garden (feat. George Xylouris)
Deacon Blues (feat. Bill MacKay)
I Love You (feat. David Pajo)
C
Sea Song (feat. Mick Turner)
I've Been The One (feat. Meg Baird)
Miracles (feat. Ty Segall)
I Want To Go To The Beach (feat. Cooper Crain)
D
Night Rider's Lament (feat. Cory Hanson)
Arise, Therefore (feat. Six Organs Of Admittance)
The Night Of Santiago (feat. David Grubbs)
The Wild Kindness (feat. Cassie Berman)
Lost In Love (feat. Emmett Kelly)
She Is My Everything (feat. Sir Richard Bishop)

With Harmonizer, his first album in two years, Ty glides smoothly into unexpected territory, right where he likes to find himself! Responding to the challenge his new songs gave him: a synthtastic production redesign, Ty kicks back with bottom-heavy creativity, dialing up a wealth of guitar and keyboard settings to do the deed. Harmonizer is a glossy, barely-precedented sound for him, and truth, it enraptures the ear — but in Ty’s hands, the sound is also a tool that allows him to cut through dense undergrowth, making for some of his cleanest songs and starkest ideas to date. Harmonizer’s production model couches tightly-controlled beats in thick keyboard textures, with direct-input guitar signal whining and buzzing purposefully from left to right. The Freedom Band appear all over the record, but often one at a time, their contributions leaving a distinctive footprint on the proceedings wherever they appear. Operating in this airtight environment with an eye towards precision, feel, and explosive mass, Ty’s crafted a formidable listening encounter — and once you get between the lines, the need to know more grows more compelling with every song.

The thing about closed doors is they need opening again, no matter what happens. You open them and then you can pass through them. And there’s light on the other side. That’s what this album is about.

Bursting with transcendent energy, Harmonizer is an extension of the classic style of Emotional Mugger and Sleeper, revisiting the lonely days and loathsome nights of the alienated, grown-up-wrong soul, to make it all right in the end.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Learning
Whisper
Erased
Harmonizer
Pictures

Side B
Ride
Waxman
Play
Feel Good
Changing Contours

Seven years and a handful of lifetimes ago, New Bums came out of nowhere with their debut album, ‘Voices In a Rented Room’ - a record the New York Times described as “feeling like it’s falling apart.” New Bums took this as a compliment and, thus emboldened, they toured relentlessly in support of the release: criss-crossing the USA in the spring of 2014, with a European run that summer. Then, silence descended, as the Bums withdrew to the place from which they’d mysteriously emerged.

Now, the Bums are back. 2021 finds them with a new album in hand. Following a West Coast US tour in late 2019 it’s clear that the duo of Donovan Quinn (Skygreen Leopards) and Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance, Rangda, etc) are fully reanimated, as evidenced by the songs and sounds of ‘Last Time I Saw Grace’.

Retaining the drunk-dog-locomotion of their debut, New Bums sprinkle a bit of fresh fancy into their signature twin guitarsand- vocals sound, with cleaner recording techniques, further developments in harmonies and a new appreciation for a song with more than two parts, making ‘Last Time I Saw Grace’ nothing less than the perfect progression from the purposefully murky mixes of their debut.

Continuing to embrace an acoustic rock ’n’ roll sound, inspired by artists such as Jacobites, Robyn Hitchcock, Johnny Thunders, Replacements and such, New Bums push the words and the stories to the front of the line, crafting tales with satiric glee on ‘Last Time I Saw Grace’. However, this world of empty perfume bottles, bodies tied to masts and moving onward to devastation (after the bottle on the table pulls out a gun) feels much more Gombrowiczian dreamscape than drunken night on the town. Yes, everything is wasted but this is an existential wasteland rather than a substance-laden one. This combination of arch Californian post-aristocratic melodrama with torn and frayed acoustic guitars opens up a new genre entirely, one those at Drag City are tempted to call Rent Control Romantic.

TRACK LISTING

Billy, God Damn
Obliteration Time
Marlene Left California
Onward To Devastation
Wild Dogs
Cover Band
Tuned To Graffiti
Street Of Spies
Hermitage Song
So Long, Kus
Follow Them Up The Slope

2015. Two boys with guitars on their chests, stretching songwriting muscles and finding, to their delight, new possibilities at every run up the neck. This means trading vocal parts mid-song, then trading back again, modulating madly through rhythm changes, looking for a note in the harmony they’d never played or sung before. All in the service of locating the feelgood pop alchemy in a song in which no parts are repeated. Laying it all down with a sweet solid state vibe.

“Whatever happened to ‘She’s a Beam’!?!” has been a question/passive-aggressive demand from Ty and Cory aficionados over the past few years. This is what happened. It went to Heaven and lived a beautiful life there. This is the sound of it. Guitars and harmonies. Helium-coated keyboards. A celestial, Steve Millerish synth transformation. Positivity. Lightness. Rock. Epic. Energetic. Happy, headbanging days.

‘Milk Bird Flyer’ is a perfect other ‘A’ to pair with ‘She’s a Beam’, hovering on a fade-in fanfare of gleaming guitar godness before shifting into a countryish tripper with cheerful Psilo-sci-fi-bin lyrics to bend and stretch the ecstatic shuffle of the beat. As with ‘She’s a Beam’, Ty and Cory are floating so tight in the harmony that we’re like “Who’s who?”

The pure sounds of yesterday are bright like a moment in time just waiting for its chance to exist, a nugget of potency landing right between the eyes in any era. Turn it up and smile, smile, smile.

TRACK LISTING

She’s A Beam
Milk Bird Flyer

Dope Body are back with their first album since 2015 - and it’s got all the gnarly, bisected body rock of their great records from the far side of the teens.

A decade plus from the audacity of their debut cassette, ‘20 Pound Brick’, and four years after calling it quits, ‘Crack a Light’ is about getting back to essentials.

In 2016, Dope Body were fairly much burnt from seven years of nonstop playing and recording, feeling as if their four albums had tracked away from the early days’ intentions of spontaneous weirdness. The band had formed in the abstract, an art project designed to provoke by embodying values that didn’t necessarily reflect any deep roots in their collective mindset. They were good with this approach for a minute but by their final release of the initial run, ‘Kunk’, they were composing new pieces from leftover parts of the ‘Lifer’ sessions, as if trying to relocate the almost out-of-body state that they’d been conceived in.

Turns out they just needed a bit of time off. Even (or perhaps especially) with a couple of the guys on the West Coast and the other two back east, the energy is again surging out of the Dope Boys, as witnessed by ‘Crack a Light’s explosive and exuberant opening track, ‘Curve’. The refrain “I think I feel alright” expresses relative optimism on the oft-scorched earth of Dope Body and it should - with ‘Crack a Light’ they’ve come all the way around to the stance of their experimental genesis, while continuing to evolve the identity that’s emerged since then - all of which bodes well for the future of rock music.

Essentially a power-trio with singer, Dope Body have traditionally excelled at projecting monstrously-voiced street music, artfully welded to the massive space of rock anthems, hardcore and metallic, hard-rolling funk, driven by incisively pounding rhythm and attenuated with guitar loops and FX.

TRACK LISTING

Curve
Clean & Clear
Lethargic
Jer Bang
Daylight
Lu Lu
Lo & Behold
The Sculptor
Mutant Being
More
Hypocrite
My Man
Frank Says Relapse
Known Unknown

For his first record in….uh, well, just a little over a year (!), Bill Callahan’s given us his first Gold Record. They can’t all be gold, and they’re not all six years apart either — all good! You could probably call the album “Gold Records,” too: all the songs have a stand-alone feel, like singles, meant for you to have a deep encounter with all of a sudden, from the start of the song to the finish. And what do you got when you have a record full of singles — and let’s face it, hit singles, at that?

That’s a Gold Record for you.

From the top, it’s clear this is music with an affection for people, as Bill immediately slips easily and deeply into his characters. Among them: a limo driver, a watcher of television, a suitor, a man in a broken-down car, a reader of books, a Ry Cooder superfan, and in the closing number, a wanderer who “notices when people notice things”. The voices of the people, with their ups and downs, their loss and laughter. You can feel the love.

For Bill, preparing to tour for Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest meant considering being away from home for long stretches of time — maybe up to a year, who knew? Feeling his oats, Bill pulled out a few sketches from over the years and touched them up. Before he knew it, he was recording them, and in the shuffle, newer songs started popping up.

It happened fast. Basics were recorded live with Matt Kinsey playing guitars, guitars, guitars and Jaime Zurverza holding it down “and then letting it go” on bass. Drums and horns were brought in for a couple songs. Spirits were high! Six out of the ten were done first take; overdubs, when needed, came equally quickly. Listening, one hears their intuitive cohesion coming together richly behind Bill’s titanic voice spread across the stereo spectrum: the gentle conversation of Bill and Matt’s guitars, the subtle percussion of the bass and drums, and odd appearances of trumpet, woodwind and synth, striking notes both decorous and discordant, sounding for all the world like the naturally occurring sound meant to accompany and express lives lived everywhere.

These are in fact songs meant for other people to sing — but until they do, Bill’s got this. He’s got a secret on this one, and before we go, we don’t mind sharing it with you: he’s figured out how to perfectly place his voice in proximity to your ear. It’s based on the distance from your heart to your brain. Simple! Why don’t more people think like this?

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: It would appear that Mr. Callahan is entering a super productive time in his life, with not one but two records out in the short space of a year. This follows on from 'Sheepskin..' in many ways, with the more languid, minimal moments echoing those from the gorgeous 2019 outing, but with a little more focus on Callahan's (still) spellbinding vocal drawl. Beautiful stuff.

TRACK LISTING

1. Pigeons
2. Another Song
3. 35
4. Protest Song
5. The Mackenzies
6. Let's Move To The Country
7. Breakfast
8. Cowboy
9. Ry Cooder
10. As I Wander

Summer 2020, and No Age are back out on the street! 

Effortlessly raw and extravagant in one practiced swoop, they set their live/bedroom internal clock and get out early into a glorious windtunnel of naked beats and sunbaked guitars, forming a wave from which they hang eleven tunes. 

A perfectly balanced set, ranging from their classic punk and indie to ever-evolving soundscapes, in maybe their most direct statement yet.

TRACK LISTING

Sandalwood 02:31
Feeler 02:40
Smoothie 03:53
Working Stiff Takes A Break 01:01
War Dance 02:33
Toes In The Water 03:11
Turned To String 03:41
A Sigh Clicks 02:26
Puzzled 03:59
Head Sport Full Face 03:55
Agitating Moss 03:05

Recorded live at BBC Radio 1, Maida Vale, May 3rd, 2019.

The songs continue to evolve; two each from the classic OM releases Advaitic Songs and God Is Good, encompassingly recorded and mixed with the pristine quality that BBC engineers (and OM) bring to recorded sound.

TRACK LISTING

Gethsemane 11:17
State Of Non-Return 8:22
Cremation Ghat I 3:43
Cremation Ghat II 5:37

It’s a year and a half since the release of Freedom’s Goblin. A winter of rain has buried the recent times of drought. Now voices from the garden cry of desire and disaster, but outside the gates, rebirth is happening.

“Our salivating makes it all taste worse,” croons Ty Segall in the first salvo of First Taste. He’s talking about us: how we’re the masters of our own destiny, tellers of our own prophecy, makers of our own sickened choices. It’s a warning, but this time, the finger is pointing back at him too. He’s one with us.

Contradictions are rife. First Taste is an introspective set after the extroversions of Freedom’s Goblin — yet just as steeped in party beats somehow, even as Ty trails through his back pages, reflecting on family, re-encountering pasts, anticipating futures. Feeling, like it was the first time, the duplexity of core truths. Lines of struggle wind through the songs. “My life is a mystery / I’d look inside but I can’t see,” as one goes — and yet, such promisingly oblique reflections act to unravel the onion, lifting the veil. Ty skates through oneness, self-esteem, the parents — all the joys of a rain-filled childhood — while reaching outward in the here and now, feeling for a shared pulse. To go on, we need to feel it.

These are serious indoor moods, but with Ty, there’s a moment that always comes, a joke or something to crack the bubble and let some air in. It all comes together with volcanic energy — who knows what it means? One disaster ends another; mudslides down the hills into gaping canyons, freeways blocked, the sky filled with smoke. Then we go on.

Meanwhile, the sounds — what are they? This production is INSANE, far-out, stranger than known, tones and rhythms that expand before our ears. These colors are weird. Together, they float like a flag, flashing binary lines like sirens to our eyes. There’s tons of drums, and acoustic . . . . things of all kinds. Horns, synth pads. Pianny. Boiling overtime, Ty’s creative juices suggested that First Taste be written and executed with some radical new instrumentation — koto, recorder, bouzouki, harmonizer, mandolin, saxophones and brass, voices, and sure, a sprinkling of keys. And the drumkit(S!), a position Ty occupies whenever it’s heard on the left speaker, while Freedom Band drummer (and SO much more) Charles Moothart plays the kit on the right side. Those two get DOWN together. Whatever the mood is, the pedal is pushed cleanly to the metal — and that means to the max of the lightest ballads ever, OR through the most raging rocks yet. Ty’s vocal prowess, always a highlight, sits in fresh relief against his mutant orchestra, spooling tension through some of his most patient songs, his feral scream in complete control. Taking us through it.

First Taste is arch, full of high-energy jams, with a thing in each mix always insistently different. Ty’s song design’s all over the place — not even a surprise anymore — but unlike the freewheeling feast style of Freedom’s Goblin, these twelve numbers form a tightly revolving cycle of song and sound that focuses thoughts. First Taste isn’t really the first for Ty, or you or me. But for the latest, it’s a remarkably fresh taste. Maybe it’s the first for today — and when tomorrow is today, then too.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: It's their first since last year's 'Freedom Goblin', and Ty Segall have once again pulled a stormer out of the bag (would it ever have gone any differently?). Incendiary, rawkous, ingenious and not unexpected in the slightest. One of the most confounding and reliable bands out there at the moment. Brilliant.

TRACK LISTING

1 Taste
2 Whatever
3 Ice Plant
4 The Fall
5 I Worship The Dog
6 The Arms
7 When I Met My Parents (Part 1)
8 I Sing Them
9 When I Met My Parents (Part 3)
10 Radio
11 Self Esteem
12 Lone Cowboys

As you listen to Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest, a feeling of totality, of completeness, steals over you, like a thief in broad daylight. Of course it does – you’re listening to a new Bill Callahan record! The first one in almost six years! What more do you need to complete you?

Or perhaps, after all the time, the obvious needs to be made just a little more explicit?

First, it’s a different kind of record. Bill’s now writing from somewhere beyond his Eagle-Apocalypse-River headspace, and Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest is very much its own beast. The songs are, by and large, shorter, and there are more of them. It took almost all of the previous three albums to add up to that many. Plus, twenty’s a lot of songs! But again, it goes a lot deeper than that.

After Dream River, Bill’s life went through some changes. Good changes – marriage and a kid - but afterwards, it was suddenly harder for him to find the place where the songs came, to make him and these new experiences over again into something to sing. His songs have always been elusive, landing lightly between character study and autobiography, as the singer-songwriter often does. This felt different, though. After 20 years of putting music first, he wasn’t prepared to go away from it completely. Or was he? The lives of a newlywed, a new parent, they have so much in them – but writing and singing, it was his old friend that had helped him along to this place where he’d so happily arrived. Was there room for everybody? While sorting it all out, he worked on songs every day – which meant that for a while, there were lots of days simply confronting the void, as he measured this new life against the ones he’d previously known.

It informed the shape of the album. Moving gradually from reflections upon the old days in “Ballad of The Hulk” and “Young Icarus” to the immediacy of the present moment in “Watching Me Get Married” and “Son of the Sea”, Bill traces the different life lines, casually unwinding knotty contradictions and ambiguities with an arresting stillness. The sense of a life thunderstruck by change infuses Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest– the songs wander from expressions of newfound joy and great contentment to other snapshots, considerations of the not-joy that we all know. Unsettling dream-images and mythic recollections are patiently received; the undertow of the past is resisted, pulling against it instead into the present, accepting revolutions of time and the unconscious as a natural flow.

These transcendent expressions are wedded translucently to the music. Acknowledging the uncertainty in which the songs were assembled, Bill went to the studio alone, unsure if he could find what he was looking for with a band riding along – because who knew how long it would take? This allowed the fluidity of his song-thoughts to be laid down with the right feeling. Once there was guitar and vocals, the other parts came. Matt Kinsey’s guitar partnership is an essential relationship within the music, as is Brian Beattie’s acoustic bass – but also, Bill found himself overdubbing parts himself for the first time in many years, which lent the songs an episodic drift, as if he’s passing through rooms while singing.

In it’s final mix, Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest glows incandescent – an entirely acoustic arrangement, sounds and stories shifting seamlessly, almost like one big song made of a bunch of new stories – the kind that only Bill Callahan thinks to sing.

It’s a joy to hear from this old friend – informing all the lives that we’ve led in the hearing. Good listeners and tired dancers, sing along.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Say what you will about Bill, but he sure knows how to keep writing the tunes doesn't he? A beautiful mix of brittle jazzy progressions, flickering percussion and swooning syncopated (but never jarring) melodic counterpoint show exactly why big Billy is still so present in our record collections and our hearts.

TRACK LISTING

1 Shepherd's Welcome
2 Black Dog On The Beach
3 Angela
4 The Ballad Of The Hulk
5 Writing
6 Morning Is My Godmother
7 747
8 Watch Me Get Married
9 Young Icarus
10 Released
11 What Comes After Certainty
12 Confederate Jasmine
13 Call Me Anything
14 Son Of The Sea
15 Camels
16 Circles
17 When We Let Go
18 Lonesome Valley
19 Tugboats And Tumbleweeds
20 The Beast

In 2018, Ty Segall’s Freedom’s Goblin hit with a watershed feeling. A feeling like, how much longer will rock albums like this even exist? An epic epoch double-LP that took the heroic arc of Ty’s populist masterpiece Manipulator and wadded it up into a much more aerodynamic (and harder-hitting) ball (or 20-sided D&D die), FG was also the continued work of the Freedom Band, Ty’s crew of choice since 2016. Storming the world playing songs from throughout his catalog in a series of ecstatic setlists, they sought freedom for themselves and the audience, even it if was just one night of emancipation from world’s numbing chill. Then they went and did it again the next night!

An all analog production, recorded live on stage at Teragram Ballroom in Los Angeles by Steve Albini (via mobile unit onto two-inch tape!) and mixed with Steve in Chicago at Electrical Audio, Deforming Lobes witnesses the blunt-force traumpact of The Freedom Band in full effect, updating (and upending) numbers from Melted, Emotional Mugger, Twins, Manipulator, $ingle$ 2 and Self-Titled. From the start, the “Warm Hands” suite shows the growth of the group since recording the original version for the 2017 Self-Titled album—the jam has a new life all its own, and the band explores every song with similar unrestrained curiosity, never forgetting the collective experience they’re sharing. The feeling between audience and band at Los Angeles’ Teragram Ballroom on those January nights was its own special thing; here, the band is somehow even more front and center, making Deforming Lobes the first wholly original statement from The Freedom Band and bookending the Goblin experience with a fuck of an exclamation point.

A year-plus later, another rock album exists—but what’s to be done with the guitar? These guys did everything they could get away with to a certain degree of (well-focused) depravity. Maybe now it’s time for a transition, away from live band rawk into whatever, who knows? But before you grieve your speculative future loss too hard, you really oughta get Deforming Lobes.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: By all accounts, Ty Segall are one of the most dominant forces in live music around today, and this perfectly captures the energy and visceral heft of this momentous experience. Grooves are stretched out and worked around, turning a simple riff into a multi-layered tapestry, rich with distortion and so huge you can almost feel the sweat dripping off the stage.

TRACK LISTING

1 Warm Hands
2 Squealer
3 Breakfast Eggs
4 The Crawler
5 Finger
6 They Told Me Too
7 Cherry Red
8 Love Fuzz

Fountain Fire is Bill MacKay’s second solo album on Drag City. The Chicago-based guitarist’s continued sonic journeys in conversation with himself follow a travel-worn map written in his own hand. Bill has followed the trail from familiar confines to unknown places, catalyzing a style equally enamored with the traditional and the avant-garde to make his most expansive and forceful music to date.

You can hear it in the opening track; as the lava and lakes of “Pre-California” simmer to boiling, Bill assembles a bridge of guitars, layering beams of rumbling acoustic, distorted electric, and arcing slide parts. By leaping boldly from fixed points, he makes synergetic discoveries in mid-air. This is the MacKay writing style in its most evolved state thus far, following serpentine paths within the patterns, lunging in and out of tonality with instinctive flair and a stoic sense of inevitability, forging a sonic mosaic that breathes and grows organically as it fills the space of a song.

Yet there is far more here than straitlaced sonic captures of picker’s prowess and captivating harmonic motivation. Bill’s pieces are informed by meditation and memory, impressionistic as cinematic miniatures, inspired as much by filmic and literary passions as by sure-playing hands, and always rooted with deep soul and steady intention.

As the pieces move in and out of focus in enticingly hallucinogenic fashion, Bill throws another element into play: a pair of stark and emotionally-charged vocal numbers that cause the hair to raise on the listener’s neck, etched as they are with a haunting and eerie beauty. Alongside the ever-shifting flows of instrumental color running through Fountain Fire, these moments shine blindingly, like mirages in the desert. The fire in the album title is a continuity in Bill’s life — part of his genealogy, his living history, his astrology, the scorching effect of the overdriven slide in the penultimate “Arcadia.” It is also a sigil for the chaos around us.

Bill says: “While the record definitely reflects the turbulence and urgency of the times we’re living in, it also takes an autobiographical look back at the upheaval that characterized the nomadic rambles of my formative years. I learned to adapt to this constantly shifting landscape. Grasping the unfamiliar became second-nature, and the impressions made by the unknown rapidly entered my art. The bittersweet sense of fleeting time & place became a hallmark. Now is more of a time than ever to dramatize what matters to us through our art.”

TRACK LISTING

1 Pre-California
2 Birds Of May
3 The Movie House
4 Man & His Panic
5 Welcome
6 Try It On
7 Arcadia
8 Dragon Country

Late 2016’s ‘Highway Songs’ brought Papa M back to us, after many years of silence and several harrowing dances with death for his Id-ego/host body, David Pajo. Now, two years on down the road, we’re all here again to witness ‘A Broke Moon Rises’.

‘Highway Songs’ was a necessarily cathartic experience in all phases. Afterwards, with no tour dates forthcoming (partially due to lousy clubs and their lack of wheelchair-accessible stage doors), it felt good just to play for fun again, like being in the practice space instead of the psych ward - a much healthier change of pace than some might guess. David blew it out; all the different styles he’s played in over the years, from folk-blues to metal, electronic, pop, Bollywood... all of it. When the spasms subsided, however, a back-to-roots sediment remained in the bottom of the bowl, which he read as a motive for a new Papa M album done with all acoustic instruments. That’s how there’s nothing electric about ‘A Broke Moon Rises’. Even the drums are acoustic.

The five songs of ‘A Broke Moon Rises’ find David focusing his technique in unknown directions, to find out what he can do with them. When that happens, he finds himself on the very spot where Papa M music becomes alive. As the quietly funereal march of the opening track resonates with a spare drum beat, we are completely transfixed into the open spaces around the guitars.

David’s been engineering and mixing his records for years, so the sensation of his sound-thoughts doesn’t entirely surprise us, even in their latest, acoustic anointment. Layers of guitars curl and unfurl, falling away from the centre with feathery softness. Slide figures cut through the progressions with a rusty glide. Arpeggiations flicker with light, leading into a change that’ll break on ones ear like a small revelation. Even the sound of Papa M playing in the room, leaning forward or untouching the strings, provides textural byplay in created space. ‘A Broke Moon Rises’ is meditative in the most active sense, with the unquiet mind leaping from place to place in a static, spartan theatre. All of which action makes hypnotic music, perfect for listening.

The album’s title is based upon his son’s observation of a half-moon one evening (when his son was 29) and it helped infuse the record with an essential feeling, which draws to a decidedly tasty conclusion with David taking on an Arvo Pärt piece. After years of fascination with the music, listening in passivity, he finally decided to do something about understanding it by playing it himself. If you’re wondering, that’s the key to ‘A Broke Moon Rises’.

TRACK LISTING

The Upright Path
Walt’s
A Lighthouse Reverie
Shimmers
Spiegel Im Spiegel

For his twelfth solo album - ‘What News’ - and his fourth album focused exclusively on the performance of traditional songs, Alasdair Roberts has chosen a typically unusual and eclectic pair of collaborators: Amble Skuse and David McGuinness.

On past albums ‘No Earthly Man’ and ‘Too Long In This Condition’, Alasdair relied on his deep connection to the songs to anchor often exploratory arrangements that would locate the hundreds-years-old songs in a contemporary milieu. The resulting works are magnetically compelling and have been powerfully acclaimed down the years. For his first project in this vein since 2010, Alasdair was inspired by Scottish singers such as Jeannie Robertson, Lizzie Higgins, Duncan Williamson, Elizabeth Stewart and Sheila Stewart. He had a desire to sing and not so much to play, so he asked early music scholar and Concerto Caledonia director David McGuinness (a previous collaborator) to play keyboard accompaniment for these songs, upon which Alasdair would not be playing guitar.

This was provocative: Alasdair was counting on David to respond to a counter-intuitive suggestion with surprising, idiosyncratic playing. David was challenged but up to the task. He started with the choosing of appropriate instruments, which he found at the University of Glasgow: an 1844 grand pianoforte and a ‘Mozart-style’ fortepiano of relatively recent vintage - the types of instrument they call in Holland ‘brown pianos’ (as opposed to the ‘black’ sound of the modern Steinway). To these, David added his own circa-1920 Dulcitone, a Glaswegian keyboard that plays tuning forks instead of strings.

During the process of developing the arrangements, David hit upon an idea for an additional collaborator: sonologist Amble Skuse, whose work involves interactive, electronic performance treatments. This provided a third plane for the project and thus triangulated, they were able to crystallise an approach involving a very open soundstage: David’s keyboard, Alasdair’s vocals and Amble’s structural soundscaping. This makes for beautiful and driven music that has no analogue in Alasdair’s catalogue - for while he has consistently pursued the dynamic fusion of songs from hundreds of years ago in a modern and progressive context, he hasn’t worked with a keyboard as the central instrument. The beauty of the conception is evident throughout, with immaculate engineering capturing all the nuances of David and Amble’s work. Alasdair’s singing embodies previously unheard capacities in his ever-evolving catalogue of song and he also contributes a powerful guitar obbligato and solo on ‘The Dun Broon Bride’ - no doubt in response to the fine work of his collaborators.

TRACK LISTING

The Dun Broon Bride
Johnny O’ The Brine
Young Johnstone
Rosie Anderson
The Fair Flower Of Northumberland
Clerk Colven
Babylon
Long A-Growing

‘Poke It With A Stick’ - the only record by Louisville legends Your Food - is a sui generis gem of the American underground, now faithfully reissued for the first time by Drag City. Recorded in 1983 by four scarecrows from Kentucky subsisting largely on cheap beer and baked beans, the album is a burbling burgoo of hypnotic rhythm, uncoiling tension, and sharp invective - a proud bastard of post-punk royalty.

Slint drummer Britt Walford remembers seeing Your Food at age 11: “You knew you were in the presence of something powerful whenever they played. Their sound was open and catatonic. Cathartic. You recognized it right away. A lot of it was based on the bass, which was cool, and the drums were expressive, too. Like the bass, they were simple, but odd and insistent. The guitar was angular and somehow just as present as the bass and drums, which seemed like the center. Doug’s singing went right along with it. He was mocking and smart, then bare and vulnerable, without being vulnerable.”

In the fall of 1981, the residents of 1069, Louisville’s original punk house, began to spy three teenagers lurking outside the decrepit environs. Eventually the teens grew bold enough to approach, and soon two, John Bailey and Wolf Knapp (“that’s my real name, not my punk rock name”), were learning guitar and bass in the trashed rehearsal space within. “Their practices seemed interminable at first,” remembers Charles Schultz, “and then picked up confidence and momentum.” Charles had been the drummer for Louisville’s recently defunct Dickbrains, a band described by the Village Voice as freaky weirdos who couldn’t fit in if they tried. He started playing with John and Wolf. Douglas Maxson, the Dickbrains male singer, was lured back from New York with the promise of beer and cigarettes and soon Your Food were playing weekly shows at the local Beat Club, mostly for free beer. (The third lurking teen, Janet Beveridge Bean, formed left-of-the-dial, cracked country act Freakwater with Dickbrains guitarist Catherine Irwin.)

Financed by a Pell Grant and what little cash the band could scrounge, the album was cut largely live in the studio by a guy who usually recorded church groups and self-released on the band’s own Screaming Whoredog label. The prevailing themes of restlessness and isolation are palpable in songs like opener ‘Leave’, where ennui morphs into dark comic fantasy. The punk funk of ‘Don’t Be’ fits perfectly with the downtown NYC groove of bands like ESG and Bush Tetras. Doug’s sardonic wit laces each song with trenchant, first-class put-downs. “Everybody really wants to be your friend / Shit, I wouldn’t even want to talk like you.”

The band became big brothers and bad influences for prepubescent Slint project Languid And Flaccid (which included Will Oldham’s elder brother Ned). It was a golden age but a waning one, an adolescent state before hope or commercial prospect or any plan for the future. When no one gives a damn what you are doing, you are free to do what you want.

Your Food managed three short tours in a world before cell phones, social media, or global positioning and earned the admiration of the few who heard them but they were sonically out of step with the then-dominant hardcore scene, where speed and aggression alone were valued. It all came to a spectacularly bitter end on the side of some frozen, forlorn highway in West Virginia. The tour van broke down three times in four days. The money for the planned second album went to repairs and the band, beaten and broken, called it quits.

TRACK LISTING

Leave
Foreign
Baby Jesus
Cool/Cowtown
New Pop
Corners
Don’t Be
Here
Order

Freedom’s Goblin is the new Ty Segall album: 19 tracks strong, filling four sides of vinyl nonstop, with an unrestricted sense of coming together to make an album. It wants you to get your head straight — but first, the process will make your head spin! Back in the Twins days, we talked about the schizophrenia of Ty’s outlook; today, it’s super-dual, with loads of realities all folding back on each other. On any given side, we’re tracking five or six full-blown personalities, unconcerned with convention or continuity.

So drop the needle — who can say what it’ll sound like where it lands? This is Freedom’s Goblin — one track engendering, the next one oppressing, violence up in the mix — a look at everything around that Ty used to make the songs. What will you use it for when you listen? The songs came in the flow of the year: days of vomit and days of ecstasy and escape too, and days between. The rulebook may have been tossed, but Freedom’s Goblin is thick with deep songwriting resources, be it stomper, weeper, ballad, screamer, banger or funker-upper, all diverted into new Tydentities — each one marking a different impasse, like a flag whirling into a knot, exploding and burning on contact, in the name of love and loathing. Freedom’s Goblin wears a twisted production coat: tracks were cut all around, from L.A. to Chicago to Memphis, whether chilling at home or touring with the Freedom Band. Five studios were required to get all the sounds down, engineered by Steve Albini, F. Bermudez, Lawrence “Boo” Mitchell and of course, Ty himself.

The goal was getting free, embracing any approach necessary to communicate new heights and depths, new places for the fuzz to land among octaving harmonies, dancefloor grooves, synths, saxes and horns, jams, post-Nicky-Hopkins r’n’b electric piano vibes, children-of-the-corn psycho-rebellions, old country waltzes and down-by-the-river shuffles. Basically, the free-est pop songs Ty’s ever put on tape. And one about his dog, too! We’re ALL Goblins and we ALL want our Freedom. The freedom to love or to be alone; to be pretty or pretty ugly; the freedom to turn the other cheek or to turn up the volume. And of course, the freedom to make just about any kind of song you think will free people when they hear it. But there’s that goblin of freedom too — and once you let it out of the bottle, it can fuck with you, so . . . take it or leave it. Go away or go all the way in. Live free and die! BUT be careful what you wish for . . . .

TRACK LISTING

1 Fanny Dog
2 Rain
3 Every 1’s A Winner
4 Despoiler Of Cadaver
5 When Mommy Kills You
6 My Lady’s On Fire
7 Alta
8 Meaning
9 Cry Cry Cry
10 Shoot You Up
11 You Say All The Nice Things
12 The Last Waltz
13 She
14 Prison
15 Talkin’ 3
16 The Main Pretender
17 I’m Free
18 5 Ft. Tall
19 And, Goodnight

Plum is Wand’s fourth LP since the band formed in late 2013 but their " rst new album in two years. After a whirlwind initial phase of writing, recording, and touring at a frenetic clip, their newest document marks a period of relative patience; a refocusing and a push toward a new democratization of both process and musical surface.

In late winter of 2016, the band expanded their core membership of Evan Burrows, Cory Hanson, and Lee Landey to include two new members — Robbie Cody on guitar and Sofi a Arreguin on keys and vocals. From the outset, the new ensemble moved naturally toward a changed working method, as they learned how to listen to each other and trust in this songwriting process was consciously relocated to the practice space, where for several months, the band spent hours a day freely improvising, while recording as much of the activity as they could manage. Previously, Wand songs had generally been brought to the group setting substantially formed by singer and guitarist Cory Hanson; now seedling songs were harvested from a growing cloudbank of archived material, then ! eshed out and negotiated collectively as the band shifted rhythmically between the permissive space of jamming and the obsessive space of critique.

This new process demanded more honest communication, more vulnerability, better boundaries, more mercy and persistence during a year that meanwhile delivered a heaping serving of romantic, familial and political heartbreak for everyone involved. They learned more about their instruments and their perceived limitations. Much else fell apart in their personal lives, in their bodies, and the bodies of those near to them. In this way, Plum lengthened like a shadow underneath a dusking Orange; or rather “Weird Orange,” an affectionate name given to the color of a roulette-chosen, tour-rushed batch of Golem vinyl... an idiom, an inside joke, a talisman, a bookmark, a mood ring. And meanwhile all the shifting weather, the wireless signals, the helicopters overhead. Weird orange softened, darkened delicately, and rouged itself to a Plum.

The music of Plum focuses teeming, dense, at times wildly multichromatic sounds into Wand’s most deliberate statement to date, with a long evening’s shadow of loss and longing hovering above the proceedings. Plum delicately locates the band’s tangent of escape from the warm and comfortable shallows of genre anachronism, an eyes-closed, mouth-open leap toward a more free-associative and contemporary pastiche of logic that more honestly re! ects the ravenous musical omnivorousness of the " ve people who wrote and played it.

It usually goes without saying — we are so lucky to have had each other in this time, and we are more than lucky to have you all listen to this record.

TRACK LISTING

1 Setting
2 Plum
3 Bee Karma
4 CDG
5 High Rise
6 White Cat
7 The Trap
8 Ginger
9 Blue Cloud
10 Driving

Introducing The Peacers’ ‘Introducing The Crimsmen’. Escalating from a disembodied voice to slowly mounting full-band hypnosis, this is a trip into the golden rod days of fandom, a dimension where a T-shirt could change your life.

Since their first album in the summer of 2015, The Peacers have been gigging in SF and around, woodshedding and collecting tunes for this divinely awaited moment. Lurching back into life, with buzz and hum alight and colours flashing, is the name but the instigators of the sound are almost a whole other bunch (Mike Donovan, Shayde Sartin, Mike Shoun and Bo Moore).

The tunes rock forth from a jukebox with a crack in the glass, with channels leaking / kaleidoscopic aspects of low-fi life directed back through the wires to form discrete detail, little shadows, backdrops, edgework.

Whether gentle psych, basement throb, keening ‘Time Of The Season’ nocturne or ground-glass soundscape, it’s all bubblegum boiled in pot, scripted up with stinging street smart reverie and a wink and a chill grin.

TRACK LISTING

Hoz
Black Fences
Haptic Chillweed
Jurgen’s Layout
D.T.M.T.Y.C.Y.M.
Robot Flame
Windy Car
Ma State Fugue/
Return Of The Roller
Theme From Sonny
On Matt
Aboriginal Flow
Organ Zip
A Golden Age
Snoopy Bag
Staying Home
R. Reg
Child Of The Season

Another New Year, and new shapes are forming — if only we are fortunate enough to notice them! As we spin through this world, we are witness to all manner of combinations unfolding before us — familiar arcs and breaking waves alike, upon all of which it is our choice, our chance and our challenge, to possibly ride. Find Me Finding You, the new album from the new organization called the Laetitia Sadier Source Ensemble, manages to strike new chords while touching familiar keys in the song of life.

From its percolating opening beat, Find Me Finding You locates new systems within the sound-universe of Laetitia Sadier. This in itself isn’t a surprise — Laetitia has relentlessly followed her music through different dynamics and into a variety of dimensions over the course of four solo albums since 2010 (not to forget her three albums with Monade and the long era of Stereolab) — but the nature of the construction here stands distinctly apart from her recent albums. Laetitia was inspired by a mind’s-eye envisaging of geometric forms and their possible permutations. As she sought to replicate the shapes in music, this guided the process of assembly for the album.

Part of the freshness of Find Me Finding You comes from working and playing within the Source Ensemble and exploring new sound combinations via a set of youthful and evolving musical relationships. Laetitia recognized the energy of the tracks in their initial form, and sought to preserve their vitality by not retaking too many performances — instead, the rawness in the tracks was retained and refi ned at the mixing stage, maintaining an edge throughout. When we hear synth lines diving, lifting and drifting, unusual guitar textures, the plucked sound of fl at wound bass strings or the bottomless pulsing of bass pedals stepping out of the mix with an exquisite vibrancy, this is the sound of the Source Ensemble.

A key to Laetitia’s music is her use of vocal arrangements. Throughout Finding Me Finding You, the shifting accompaniment creates space to bring this element gloriously forward. Arranged by Laetitia with Joe Watson and Jeff Parker making string charts that were subsequently transposed to vocal parts for several songs, richly arranged choirs of voices provide depth along with the thrilling presence of extra breath in the sound. Laetitia’s community-politic is well-served by the groups of voices lending support to the machining of the song craft, providing additional uplift to her quintessentially forward-facing viewpoint — as well as massed voices from three different countries sharing space in harmony!

Working in collaboration is Laetita’s traditions, and a key to this album’s view on being free together (it is necessary, preferable and right!). The designation of Source Collective implies a new togetherness phase; alongside long-time collaborators Emmanuel Mario and Xavi Munoz, keyboard and fl utes parts played by David Thayer (Little Tornados) were essential contributions, as well as further keys, synths and electronics from Phil M FU and several intense guitar sequences from Mason le Long. Chris A Cummings (aka Marker Starling, Laetitia’s favorite composer) graciously wrote “Deep Background” for her. The duet with Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor on “Love Captive” (not to mention Rob Mazurek’s distinctive coronet playing!) gives voice to an ideological cornerstone of Find Me Finding You — that, should we be responsible enough to endeavor into a world of basic incomes and open relationships, we would make astonishing strides as a society. These sorts of things can only be done in agreement with others.

Expressing great compassion and expectation with startling immediacy, as well as an abiding belief in an underlying unity that permeates and intimately binds all things and beings, Find Me Finding You combines a rigorous process for music-making with a deeply invested mindset, making captivating music that promises many stimulating spins to come!

TRACK LISTING

Undying Love For Humanity
Double Voice, Extra Voice
Love Captive
Pyschology Active (Finding You)
Committed
Refl Ectors
Deep Background
Galactic Emergence
The Woman With The Invisible Necklace
Sacred Project

In preparing for the first album of non-Hexadic Six Organs of Admittance music since 2012’s Ascent, Ben Chasny had a think about what he’d be saying in his own tongue for the fi rst time in a half-decade. As ever, a head-full of ideas were driving him to think and speak music as a spirituality superimposed onto a reality, with the ghosts of both whispering at each other. In the end, what sits in our listening ears is the sound of communion. Burning the Threshold brings a wealth of Six Organs-styled lightness into one of his sweetest musical meditations yet.

With a spacious acoustic soundstage, Burning the Threshold may actually more resemble 2011’s Asleep on the Floodplain. Or it may more resemble Compathia, or School of the Flower. All of this is speculative, comparative, unverifyable — but our sense of what is true tells us that nobody plays acoustic music quite like Six Organs of Admittance, and that furthermore, nothing sounds so much like Burning the Threshold as Burning the Threshold.

Ben is in a particularly expansive mood this time around, singing and playing while thinking of birds in the morning, anarchy, Third Ear Band, Gaston Bachelard, The Gnostics, Ronnie Lane and/or The Faces, Deleuze, Aaron Cheak, Odysseus, This Heat, Takoma Records, St Eustace, Dark Noontide and a HELL of a lot more than that, with all the thoughts affi xed to a quiver of potent melodies launching forth and arcing out through dimensions, seeking infi nite space.

The space radiates out from the album’s fi rst moment, with “Things As They Are,” a song examining the life of poet Wallace Stevens. Ben’s currently working on music for a theatrical work about Stevens’ life set to debut in Cleveland later in 2017. The empathetic waves generated by this song resonate throughout the album, giving a new dimension to the music of Six Organs of Admittance.

Like so many other Six Organs records, Burning the Threshold was created mostly solo, but features the singing talents of Alex Nielsen, Haley Fohr and Damon and Naomi; the drumming of Chris Corsano; a guitar duet with Ryley Walker, and keys and mixing from Cooper Crain. With this new music, Ben Chasny has created a potent tonic for our times. The gentleness found here, balanced on top of his classical asceticism, provides much of what we need in 2017 and beyond: love, forgiveness, reality and an ever-wider view, with the understanding of our circular path in this lifetime. Looking at the world through clear eyes beneath a knitted brow, but with a laugh rising up from its heart, Burning the Threshold brings us a powerful draught of essence.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Six organs of admittance pull out another beautiful album of intricate campfire folk, looped guitars and heady ambience, all topped by Chasny's brilliantly hypnotic vocal musings. An arty but accessible alt-folk masterpiece, and a journey to be undertaken time and time again.

Life is a Rorschach, life is a Rashomon. Fuck your facts. Throw ‘em out with yesterday’s webpages. Lives lie beyond the equations of currency, border lines and government —  and truth is just a drop in the beholder’s eye.

Ty Segall has made whole records that wrestle with realities — fighting against some, pulling mightily to bring others into being. Of late, he’s thrown up his hands and donned clown shoes, dancing merrily in the dual role of oppressed/oppressor! His hands aren’t any more or less dirty than anyone else’s — but amidst the thunder and the chaos of the ongoing storm, he’s looking for the eye within.

The new self-titled record — the next record after Emotional Mugger, Manipulator, Sleeper, Twins, Goodbye Bread, Melted, Lemons, and the first self-titled album that started it up in the now-distant year of 2008 — is a clean flow, a wash of transparency falling into a world that needs to see a few things through clearly, to their logical end. It’s got some of the most lobe-blasting neckwork since the Ty Segall Band’s Slaughterhouse (from way back in the long, hot summer of 2012), but it also features a steep flight of fluent acoustic settings, as Ty’s new songs range around in their search for freedom without exorcism, flying the dark colors high up the pole in an act of simple self-reclamation. All he wants is some truth!

The construction and destruction of his chosen realities has, until now, been a luxury Ty has rightfully reserved for himself, striping overdubs together to form the sound — but for this new album, he entered a studio backed by a full band — Emmett Kelly, Mikal Cronin, Charles Moothart and Ben Boye — to get a read on this so-called clarity. This leads to a new departure in group sound, as well as some of the most visceral and penetrating vocal passages yet heard from Ty Segall.

“Freedom/Warm Hands” puts the “sweet” back into suite; “Orange Color Queen” is a supreme moment of tenderness; “Talkin’,” a roots-infused truth-attack. “Papers,” looks behind the doors of Ty’s process; “Break A Guitar” is a brutal fun-fest pitched to the back of the house. Ty Segall keeps you guessing, bracing your skin with a welcome astringency, seeking to stem the bleeding with chunks and splashes of guitar, tight beats, audio-verité toilet smashes, a Wurlitzer electric piano in a jam, blazing harmonies, and LOTS of songs to sing. There’s no concept beyond that; finding the right places to be is a momentary thing. Ty Segall is the sum of his songs — and about getting the free. The free to be!

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Ty’s latest LP is more punky than sludgy, with more in common with early Pixies than his recent output. Driven, rocking and absolutely essential.

TRACK LISTING

1 Break A Guitar
2 Freedom
3 Warm Hands (Freedom Returned)
4 Talkin'
5 The Only One
6 Thank You Mr. K
7 Orange Color Queen
8 Papers
9 Take Care (To Comb Your Hair)
10 Untitled

Drag City announce the solo debut full length from Wand’s Cory Hanson. ‘The Unborn Capitalist From Limbo’ was recorded during May of 2016 in various locations across Los Angeles County and features string arrangements by Heather Lockie.

Hanson’s lyrics here are his best to date. By turns naked, leering, playful, evasive, they present a mute, parading statuary - doughy figures waltzing in doomed configurations through bleeding watercolour backdrops across terrains of tangled information. The music is gorgeous and liveable. Every surface threatens with the promise of an untold depth; every depth threatens to collapse into a surface. Every place you ply a solution turns out to be an intractable edge. You go looking for the soul, but there is no soul - just the things you had to lift to look behind.

Faun Fables are back with ‘Born Of The Sun’. Since 1998, Faun Fables has been the musical world of Dawn McCarthy, visited in collaboration with her partner Nils Frykdhal. In early times, their wild spirit roamed the streets and hills of the SF / Oakland community while, pilgrim-like, wandering the world and issuing two albums of deeply-rooted, swirlingly other folk music in 1999 and 2001. With the release of ‘Family Album’ in 2004, Drag City got involved and ‘The Transit Rider’ (2006), ‘A Table Forgotten’ (2008) and ‘Light Of A Vaster Dark’ (2010) followed. Now, suddenly, it’s 2016. Six years have passed since ‘Light Of A Vaster Dark’ appeared. Life has happened, in the form of three children born to Dawn and Nils.

Anyone who has spent time in the thrall of Faun Fables’ bewitching sound knows that this was the dream; beyond Dawn’s passion for song, dance, theatre and all manner of folklore (plus a regular regimen of yodelling), the mythic shadows of home and hearth, friends and family, have infused all of their expressions. Now, raising the family that was once only dreamed about makes for an earthier and more expansive Faun Fables album, informed by the slow and sudden progress of time that occurs when we are with the very young.

‘Born Of The Sun’ is in itself another birthing, the songs gestating over several years, then recorded mostly in concentrated periods over the past two winters. On previous albums, the passions of Faun Fables seemed to be laid firmly on the stones of the Old World. The minstrels who cavorted across the cover of ‘Mother Twilight’ seemed out of another, hard-to-place time. ‘Born Of The Sun’ continues on in this exalted tradition but also reflects the rhythms of family living, where each day is a new and irreversible step forward through the necessarily scorched earth of raising children.

Where ‘Family Album’ and ‘A Table Forgotten’ looked yearningly through time at the spiritual natures of communal living, ‘Born Of The Sun’ is forged in the crucible of now and, as such, has a feeling apart from the previous days of Faun Fables.

Dawn and Nils and the kids (whose vocals on ‘Wild Kids Rant’ suggest they are following their parents’ path into the forest) are embracing the phenomena of creation as they move inexorably forward. ‘Born Of The Sun’ is the bountiful and exuberant album of this place and time - an old, candlelit world of arcane beliefs in our brightly-lit world, growing ever more profound in the light of perpetual discovery that bathes all of Faun Fables’ songs.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: An enchanting and often beguiling mix of traditional medieval folk and swirling Californian psychedelic sounds. Progressive but coherent chord changes and textures develop as time goes on, building and morphing into a cacophony of instrumental depth and vocal intensity. Fascinating and thoroughly skilled instrumentation and (in places) frightening heart-wrenchingly poignant lyricism. A Journey not to be missed.

TRACK LISTING

Holding The Sky
YDUN
Goodbye
Ta Nasza Mlodosc
Country House Waits
Madmen & Dogs
Born Of The Sun
Wild Kids Rant
Outing In The Country
O My Stars
Invitation
Mountain

From the press release for ‘Emotional Mugger’:
“Get in the booth -
punch in the number
when they pick up
don’t say a word
just listen
shout at the double
from the damned
from a dry throat
dry eye chuckle
insistent / elastic (but never plastic)
thick / butt jump pierced by the kids
sweet angel voice sinister (what are they thinking)
guitars sliced with scribble
graffiti sprawled across the hemispheres; stuttered, stunted, dual-mono machine dreams flashing sudden stereophobic and back again / two screens alone together squeezing shaking oozing metallic pool like brain blood, slowly draining away all mental life. shaking ass / nihility at most corrodes candy’s gone no more fun.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Squealer
2. Californian Hills
3. Emotional Mugger/Leopard Priestess
4. Breakfast Eggs
5. Diversion
6. Baby Big Man (I Want A Mommy)
7. Mandy Cream
8. Candy Sam
9. Squealer Two
10. W.U.O.T.W.S.
11. The Magazine

While cycling around his home-district of Peckham (in south east London) a few years ago, Sean O’Hagan decided that not only would the new High Llamas music be driven by narratives (a collection of stories) but they would first have to be performed as theatre; reshaped theatre, if you like, blending stories, songs and soundtrack. It was essential for these performances to take place before the songs and underscores were recorded.

The resultant piece, ‘Here Come The Rattling Trees’, introduces six characters, some real, some less so, whom Sean has encountered over past years in Peckham. It is also The High Llamas’ new album.

‘Here Come The Rattling Trees’ was first performed in the Montpelier Theatre pub in Peckham in June 2014. In October 2014 it played for a week-long run at the Tristan Bates Theatre in Covent Garden, London. The original performance cast was Ray Newe, Richard Heap and Jennifer Scott Malden. The story centres around Amy, an unsettled 28-year-old with a desire to travel. Amy encounters five characters, who, it transpires, have their own stories to tell. These stories have emerged from Peckham over the past 25 years and speak of buildings and change; of hopes, ambitions and disappointments. This is the soundtrack to those stories.

With witty, artful musical strokes, Sean and The High Llamas have crafted deft musical sketches with the signature ‘Llamas’ sound that has evolved over ten album releases since 1992. A colourful array of electric, acoustic and synthetic instruments, alongside Sean O’Hagan’s gentled vocals, are deployed to transport the listener to the low key highs and lows of the British working week - an incisive, sympathetic view to the wonders slipped in between the pages and too often passed over in everyday life.

The Silence are a storm that has been brewing across Japan for over a year and now that system is breaking into the skies of the rest of the world. Their debut, self-titled release proved to be simply a preamble to the fluid and formidable electro-acoustic display of ‘Hark The Silence’.

The first record was of a song-based nature, rendered with careful beauty familiar to long-time listeners of Maski Batoh and Ghost; a sounds that turned on occasion into greater journeys. Several months after finishing that album more songs were was taped during an epic recording session in an enormous studio with an audience of listeners whose presence inspired The Silence and added to the performance. However, these recordings were only a beginning and the band returned to the studio later to refine the songs in new versions, creating a powerfully jamming album that contains all the elements of music that define The Silence in flowing and transcendent performance, all of it recorded on 24-track analogue tape, a process which brings their musical and spatial elements into dynamic balance.

Everything in the universe accessible to The Silence may be found in the ‘Ancient Wind’ trilogy that fills side one of ‘Hark The Silence’. From the depths of space rolls washes of gong, through which a terse, minimal bassline comes marching. Rattles of prepared piano spark and pass through the frame, blown over with the celestial omnipotence of a flute. The now-sensuous groove is underscored with luxuriant stereophonic drums rolling across the speakers.

Representing the state of nature from which all music as well as The Silence has to come, ‘Ancient Wind Part 1’ ceases to exist and explodes into a furious Bo-Diddley beat for ‘Part 2’, a chant replete with acid-rock guitar solos, an encompassing saxophone testament and an echounit driven drum breakdown.

Part 3 of ‘Ancient Wind’ resumes the chant in the mode of ‘Gangamanag’ (from Ghost’s ‘Hypnotic Underworld’ opus) and extends the fury of the progression in 7/8 to include a dazzling organ solo over unending volcanic eruption. As the swirling mass subsides, a few rusty blue notes from an acoustic guitar are sounded over the encroaching Silence.

Recorded completely live, ‘Ornament’ continues with resonant guitar acoustics from the fading embers of the first side, starting with a gentle mode and sung by Batoh in their native tongue, before the song ascends to explorations in space with music.

‘DEX 1’ continues the ride, a heavy jam in 4/4 dedicated to Dexter Gordon with loads of texture from keyboards and saxophone that make for very compelling physical listening.

The second half of the album contains an exquisite and intense rock arrangement from Damon and Naomi with Batoh’s tremendous singing atop the pile-driving power of The Silence in full swing, plus several other awe-inspiring encounters in live performance, minimal jamming, poetry, baritone-sax breath and group-think at its best.

As the album closes with the clarion call of ‘Fireball’ the graveyard of all history traversed by The Silence is illuminated by the dead’s spirit burning in the air - a great and profoundly jarring moment. ‘Hark The Silence’ is a composite of such moments, an album that travels enormous distances and captures live energies in astonishing studio sounds.

TRACK LISTING

Ancient Wind Part 1 & 2
Ancient Wind Part 3
Ornament
DEX #1
Galasdama
Breath Figure
Little Red Record
Company
Fireball

….further along and down the road apiece from where she took her leave of us, Joanna Newsom plays on. Breathe deep and equalize your today-ears to the new world of Divers…

Good heavens-five years go by-what can one do? Dive, listener, knowing that diversions aplenty await: a wheeling circuit of sci-fi sea-shanties and cavalier ballads; a family of polysemic song-sets; a paranomasaic Liederkreis of harmonic sympathies and knotted hierarchies; a fanfare of brazen puns and martial lullabies, blazing in sorrow and horseplay and love, in turns symphonic and spare, joined by Mellotrons and Marxophones and Moogs, clavichords and celestas-and of course the harp, thrumming its threnodies of circadian invasions and avian irruptions and strange loops of Shepard-toned resonant-frequencies and something called goddamned Simulacreage…

The music of Divers is a wonder of considered arrangements, immaculately sequenced for telescoped brevity. The music speeds with dissociative dread over montaged cityscapes; it hoofs with delight among the collaged quotations and sepia-toned codices of Popular Song; it ambles its carefree citational course through the public domain and down into the dustier corners of municipal parks, to lionize infamous airmen and anonymous Dutch Masters, to mourn pearl divers and Poorwills, and to elegize the ineluctable tragedy of relativity…

At the center of the mythos and the maelstrom is the woman. Divers reminds us that Newsom is a melodist, above all—an acolyte of melody and beauty in form, a crackerjack of emotional truth conveyed with undiluted immediacy. Here, at the aortic confluence of countless strings and wires, winking beneath the lacquered layers of instrumental nacre, biding quietly between the ranges of rhapsodic arrangement—including those by Nico Muhly, Ryan Francesconi, Dave Longstreth, and Newsom herself—there lies an intimacy seldom achieved, and simply heard. Divers dives forth with a pure love and respect for the traditions and mysteries of man, such that we can feel the surge of life itself passing over our bones as we hear the songs and sounds, the players and the arrangements; as basic maths are reviewed to uncover heights of joy and sorrow, all traced in triumphal arches and supernumerary rainbows through eternal amber, gleaming in analog entrapment-with that VOICE riding high atop-recorded with snow-bright, high-noon-verity by Steve Albini and Noah Georgeson, mixed in phantasmagoric, deep-sea-saturation by Noah and Joanna, and loosed, fuckin’ FINALLY by Drag City Records.

We have reached Peak Newsom. Divers is coming, to incline into your many and varied lifelines, for now and then and the rest of the moments that will always return in your lifetimes again. 

TRACK LISTING

01. Anecdotes
02. Sapokanikan
03. Leaving The City
04. Goose Eggs
05. Waltz Of The 101st Lightborne
06. The Things I Say
07. Divers
08. Same Old Man
09. You Will Not Take My Heart Alive
10. A Pin-Light Bent
11. Time, As A Symptom

Laetitia Sadier’s new album, ‘Something Shines’, was recorded and matured more slowly than either ‘Silencio’ or ‘The Trip’.

‘Something Shines’ was initially recorded in Switzerland, where Laetitia’s collaborator David collects amazing old keyboards and organs from people who have inherited them but find no space or usage for them.

Scattered through Europe are the component players of the ‘Something Shines’ band; drummer Emmanuel Mario in Paris and bassist Xavi Munoz in Castellon near Valencia, so additional parts were laid down in those cities. The strings were done in St. Etienne by Jean-Christophe Chante, whom Laetitia had met on a tour with French band and friends Angil - she found his playing mesmerizing and felt compelled to ask him if he would like to participate on her album, which he did, bringing a great emotional charge to the record. Laetitia recorded a lot of the content in London, including all the vocals, guitars, additional electronics and soundtrack effects as well as final mixing, which wrapped up this Spring.

The desire was for the songs of ‘Something Shines’ to alternate between a riveting caress and an invigorating shake. To start from the Earth and to tilt up, towards the sky, before coming back down to the planet again. Additionally, Something Shines is an exploration through Debord’s ‘La Société du Spectacle’ and how it is still up to us to guide and shape our fate, individually and collectively.

All these thoughts and many others are communicated throughout a delicately textured production, twinkling and shifting with the subtlety of nature and often sounding like the world outside, whooshing and chirping and clicking in time, placing these concerns in the place where we live. The production is relaxed and expert; Laetitia’s choices fit the breathing quality of the songs and wear their arrangements easily. The many tiny details within the sound scope of ‘Something Shines’ reflect the lives that hang in the balance between the issues, lives that are often too small to see yet contribute to the world as a whole.