“We like all these songs a lot. Dylan's approach to composing and playing involves hybridizing American Primitive, folk, country, soundtrack and avant influences into a unique & powerful alloy. Spinning the record is nothing short of a goddamn trip. Transportational music of the highest order. Get some today.” --Byron Coley “I made the title track a couple years ago at the beginning of summer,” writes Dylan, “I was thinking about how as you get older you have fewer new experiences. That feeling of excitement for summer fades, after it used to be such a big deal as a kid. Those experiences can only be new and vibrant once. The rest of your life can be spent in nostalgia for them. It's a sad thought and maybe not true for everyone, but I suspect it is for most.” The result, No New Summers, is Aycock’s first full length under his own name for almost a decade; it sees him journey through frayed fields of haunted solo-guitar, waves of prairie ambience and hard-won country stillness.

TRACK LISTING

1 No Spring Chicken
2 Buoyant
3 Good Directions
4 Light Peeking Through
5 Old Haunt
6 Unanchored
7 No New Summers

Featuring contributions from Jordan Tice (of Hawktail), Jay Bellerose, Harrison Whitford, Rayna Gellert, Dylan Day, Mark Goldenberg, Rich Hinman and Robert Bowlin, CRK, a self-titled affair, finds Cameron Knowler at an exciting crossroads between American tradition and forward looking guitar soli - toeing the line between personal regionalism and the universality of landscape memory. CRK draws on the history and geography of Knowler’s birthplace of Yuma, Arizona- a border town known for its lettuce production and defunct territorial prison. In line with the regional ethos of the composer Frantz Casseus and the minimalism of Bruce Langhorne, this instrumental guitar record launches into a world of desert sun, propane tanks, dark jail cells, and the verdant Colorado. Knowler ferries listeners across a sensitively crafted world with deft, understated playing, pushing the current of instrumental acoustic music forward through lush original compositions, while keeping an eye on tradition with his singular arrangements of old time fiddle tunes. With what many describe as the closest thing to the right hand of Norman Blake, Knowler’s delivery also nods to the work of creative outsiders Terry Allen and David Rawlings. With this work, Knowler sonically illuminates untold stories of the Sonoran, lending a voice to the pictorial canon made famous by Dorothea Lange and western films such as “3:10 to Yuma.” There is a sense of interiority to the record as well, Knowler says, noting that he “grew up isolated, unschooled in a desert with very little contact with children my own age.” He only returned to his hometown recently to revisit places held in memory, and CRK stands as a direct result of unpacking those landscapes coded with personal darkness. By creating an outward-facing work of art, Knowler strives to “make sandcastles out of grief” and emblazon the diorama of his youth. With CRK, the world receives a sound poem, a memory palace that stands as a document of both personal grief and acceptance of the many dimensions of a place. We hear the sweeping landscapes of the Sonoran desert, and the darkness housed therein, even in The Sunniest Place on Earth.

TRACK LISTING

1. Christmas In Yuma
2. Felicity
3. On A Widow's Outfit
4. Yuma Ferry
5. Mohave Runs The Colorado
6. Secret Water
7. La Paz
8. Last House On Walpi
9. Farewell, Miss Forbes
10. A Dove's Call
11. Mule At The Wagon
12. Sun Dust

Old Saw, the enigmatic New England collective led by Henry Birdsey (Tongue Depressor), return with their third long-playing record, Dissection Maps. It is not enough to trace the fields. The choreo-cartographic demands the casting of stone, a grassfire, a carnival; something with which to rupture the horizontality of existence and imagine the vertical.Earth is the eighth morning, folded against the week's work. The field is a line drawing of oblivion. The house is a forest in the shape of a womb. America is a quarry in the image of god.(Aidan Patrick Welby – 2024)

“The band captures the American stretch, the spaces in-between and the hollowness that haunts us along those routes…fades the radio to static to let the nothingness linger among the soul.” (Raven Sings the Blues) “ evokes an ambience of prayer-like solemnity that celebrates something decidedly terrestrial, what the label describes as “a rusted and granular shadow world where the dive bar meets the divine.” It recalls one of those junkyard shrines built by some sincere eccentric, improbably wonderful forms of weathered stone and scrap metal standing like totems to an unrecognised religion rooted in the earth around us.” (Various Small Flames).

TRACK LISTING

Sleeps With Dice
Singing Loom
Dealt In Silver
Revival Hearing
Measured Mile End
Last Rings

The prominent biblical city of Shiloh was first mentioned in the Book of Joshua: And the whole congregation of the children of Israel assembled together at Shiloh, and set up the tabernacle of the congregation there. And the land was subdued before them. (Joshua 18:1) It held a perhaps unsurpassed place of importance for the Israelites until the construction of Solomon’s Temple and elevation of Jerusalem as the capital of a united Israel some centuries later. The Shiloh, which is our primary matter of interest here, is not the biblical city, but rather a namesake community in rural Overton County, Tennessee, situated in the Upper Cumberland region of the Appalachian Plateau near the Tennessee/Kentucky border. It isn’t a town, but a community made up of a church, two cemeteries, a smattering of houses, some farmland surrounded by forested hills, and a mostly gravel road that is too narrow in many stretches for two cars to pass each other.

The West Fork of the Obey River tumbles through the area at a fairly leisurely pace, and Joseph’s father, who was born in the adjacent and slightly easier to access community of Allred, always called Shiloh Road “the River Road” since the road and the river often unfurl through the valley side by side. The instrumental pieces for guitars and banjo on the album at hand mostly depict images and events, both real and imagined, that take place in Shiloh and the broader river valley it’s situated in. “I won’t go into the details of the inspiration for each tune here,” Allred comments, “but I will say that Shiloh is a place where the distinction between past and present isn’t always clearly defined. It’s a kind of “mandorla," a place where the spheres of past and present, dead and living, immanent and transcendent, overlap.

It’s also a place that has attracted some odd characters over the years, or just people who are weary and trying to find refuge.” “Though I grew up in a small town about 25 miles away from Shiloh and have lived in Boston since 2016, my dad’s side of the family has been in the area for over 200 years, and that valley feels a lot like the place I’ll be buried when I die.” With all that said, we present to you The Rambles and Rags of Shiloh.Housed in a gatefold sleeve courtesy of the glorious folk art of Jonny Brokenbrow.

TRACK LISTING

1) Sweetcorn Ramble
2) The Dervish
3) Linville Rag
4) Overture For Lodge No, 637
5) Dance Of The Fair Folk
6) Before The Lord
7) The Emerald City
8) West Fork Rag
9) March Of The True Bugs
10) Blues For Terry Turtle