DRAG CITY News

"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 YTILAER. 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. "You do what you"ve got to do / To see the picture" Bill"s got a full band sound going on this one, with him and Matt Kinsey on guitars, Emmett Kelly on bass and backing vocals, Sarah Ann Phillips on B3, piano and backing vocals and Jim White on drums. Jim and Matt sing on one song, too, and some other singers come in, too. Bill plays some synth here and there, and Carl Smith drifts in and out of the picture with his contra alto clarinet, as do Mike St. Clair and Derek Phelps on brass. Somehow in between them all, you might think you hear the distant sound of a steel guitar. And you might - but you might not, too. In this company, Bill continues his journey, tunneling underneath the weathered exterior of what seems to be and into the more nuanced life everything takes on in the dark. With Bill"s voice making the extraordinary leaps and bounds that measure the lives of the songs, the band follow him through passages that seem to invent themselves; other times playing with deeply soulful grooves and/or desperate intensity, as these moments come and go. There"s nothing they can"t do. "I wrote this song in five and forever / I"m writing it right now" Bill sings on "Natural Information" - an admission of the everyday alchemy he"s forever trafficking in. Time passes, triangulating the encounters that went into any one record with two out of any three others, all of it made flesh, new constitution, in our stereo speakers. If every album is its own life, it stands to reason that they"re invariably passing in the night. Cascading images flowing from the stream of consciousness. Turning like pages from the journal, unspeakably personal, then suddenly become tall tales, like a book pulled off the shelf, completely unbound. Headlines flow through. Mirror images, mirthful ones. Bill"s lyrics strain at the lines on the page, not content to separate the printing of the fact from the myth or be confined to ink on paper. They want to fly free. And they do. "I realize now that dreams are real" On YTILAER"s inner sleeve, alongside his lyrics, Bill celebrates the "exhilaration and dread" of cover artist Paul Ryan"s paintings. Paul"s another one met up with again down the road, his indelible cover imagery on Apocalypse and Dream River now an axis of meaning in the Callahanian world - and in the bright colors found in these new images, a parallel to Bill"s recognitions here. "A breath of exquisite air as we come up from drowning", sounds like the desired hope for those hearing the songs of YTILAER.

Meg Baird’s songs are rarely made up of tidy stories. In fact, for Meg, mystery itself is often the
medium. With ‘Furling’, Meg’s fourth album under her own name, she explores the breadth of
her musical fascinations and the environments around them - the edges of memory,
daydreams spanning years, loose ends, loss, divergent paths, and secret conversations under
stars. ‘Furling’ moves through these varied spaces with the slippery, misty cohesiveness of a
dream - guided by an ageless, stirring voice that remains singular and unmistakable.
Since co-founding the beguiling and beautiful Espers in the mid-aughts amid Philadelphia’s
fertile underground music community, Meg’s solo recordings have constituted just a fraction of
her work.
Her first solo LP, the disarmingly out-of-time ‘Dear Companion’ (2007), saw her carve a quiet,
sunlit space away from the flickering swirl of Espers. Since her last solo releases, ‘Seasons on
Earth’ (2011) and ‘Don’t Weigh Down the Light’ (2015), Meg has lent thunderous drumming,
lead vocal, and poetry to Heron Oblivion (Sub Pop) on an album that garnered praise from the
New York Times and made Mojo’s Top Ten Albums Of 2016 list. She collaborated with harpist
Mary Lattimore on the mesmerizingly hazy ‘Ghost Forests’ (2018). She’s played drums with
Philadelphia scuzz-punks Watery Love (In The Red, Richie Records) and explored her deep
familial folk roots in the Baird Sisters (Grapefruit Records). She also contributed her vocal
arrangements to albums from Sharon Van Etten, Kurt Vile, Will Oldham and Steve Gunn, and
toured with Angel Olson, Dinosaur Jr., Bill Callahan, Thurston Moore and Bert Jansch, among
others.
Yet ‘Furling’ is the album that most irreverently explores the span of her work and musical
touchstones. It showcases her natural tether to 1960s English folk traditions. But it also reveals
her deep love for soul balladry, the solitary musings of Flying Saucer Attack and Neil Young
shackled to his piano deep in the foggy pre-dawn, dubby Bristol atmospherics, the melancholy
memory collage of DJ Shadow’s ‘Endtroducing’, and the delicious, Saturday night promise of
St. Etienne.
‘Furling’ was primarily recorded at Louder Studios by Tim Green (Bikini Kill, Nation of Ulysses,
Melvins, Wooden Shjips). Additional piano and vocal recording were captured at Panoramic
Studios in Stinson Beach, CA with Jason Quever (Papercuts). It was mastered in Brooklyn by
Heba Kadry, who mixed Bjork’s ‘Utopia’ and mastered albums for Slowdive, Cass McCombs
and Beach House.
For all its adornments, ‘Furling’ remains deeply intimate. The entire album was performed by
Meg and her long-time collaborator, partner, and Heron Oblivion bandmate Charlie Saufley.
While her prior solo work hinted at more expansive horizons, ‘Furling’ explores the idea of Meg
Baird as a band much more freely. Venturing beyond the musical confines of fingerstyle guitar,
she plays drums, mellotron, organs, synths, and vibraphone over her piano and guitar
foundations. Her distinctive, simultaneously elegiac and uplifting vocals, meanwhile, connect
surreal dream montages, graft sunshine sonics to swooning mediations on romantic solidarity
in trying times, and weave odes to the simple gestures of friendship - and the loss of family and
friends.
This rich sound world makes the songs a varied bunch: ‘Twelve Saints’ mates Pacific sunset
ambience and Pink Floyd pastoral to a meditation on mortality and escape. The infectious and
kinetic ‘Will You Follow Me Home’ contemplates hope and longing through the looking glass of
a Jimmy Miller-era-Stones strut. And in the closing piece, ‘Wreathing Days’, language
disintegrates over tone clusters that feel somewhere between falling and flying.
‘Wreathing Days’ also reveals much about Meg’s mastery of contrast - situating the dear and
delicate adjacent to chaos. And while it’s true that some songs on ‘Furling’ grapple with
humanity’s existential unknowns in stark terms, they primarily revel in the mysteries that hide in
nature and humanity at their most ordinary. ‘Furling’ lives in the notion that whole universes of
experience, enlightenment, elation and ecstasy can bloom in these corners.

Barely heard in his lifetime (1961-2002) but hailed as an outsider hero of ur-punk since 2009’s ‘Cosmic Lightning’ compilation, J.T. IV strikes back!

15 unheard-of tracks found on an obscure cassette tape make the schizo split in his music - rabid rock & roll fantasy and cold-eyed acoustic introspection - an epic. ‘The Future’ is J.T. IV’s mad magnum opus.

The 2009 comp LP, ‘Cosmic Lightning’, cast his tragic silhouette up on the big screen
for all to see: the lost boy, alone in the world, standing before the mic and releasing
his inner star with glee and vengeance, his antisocial visions flying high atop a raging
funnel of distorted guitars and blunt rhythms. Or couched, childlike, within a heart
breaking billow of acoustic guitars - a schizophrenic split that only magnifies the
display of his deep emotions.
‘The Future’ goes even further, excavating fifteen recordings from a previously
unheard-of cassette entitled ‘The Best Of Johnny Zhivago Retrospective 1979–1993’,
and adding four more uncollected tracks from his slim (and impossible to find
anyway) discography.
Of these nineteen tracks, eight are covers - and J.T. IV’s picks, from Velvets to Mott
the Hoople, Roxy Music, Lee Hazlewood, The Kinks, Eno and Stephen Sondheim,
sharpen our image of the misfit adrift; on the outside looking in, but maybe just a few
steps away from his goal.
‘The Future’ unfolds like an epic, as both sides of J.T.’s persona - the street-smart,
damaged rocker and the heart struck poet of the scene - live on together in the best
performances of his short career.
A punk of the old order, John Henry Timmis IV was born in 1961 into a dysfunctional,
abusive and eventually broken family. By the mid-70s, he was desperate to get out,
running away from his mother’s home several times while still a teenager living in the
greater Chicagoland area. At wit’s end, she had him committed to the Menninger
Clinic for a year or so. Released on his own reconnaissance, he began his meteoric
ascent to the mythic level of self-aggrandizement in which he appears here. Inspired
by the underground, proto-punk sounds in the air (the likes of which any sharp-eyed
young thing might chance upon in the back pages of Creem, Crawdaddy, Trouser
Press, etc.) and desperate to be heard himself, J.T. presented like the scabby
younger brother of Bangs and Laughner: born only to rock, his musical conception a
rabid personality crisis of proselyte elitism and nihilist excess.
Now, 20 years on from his passing, ‘The Future’ is ever farther away from the world
in which he struggled so mightily - but his stinging iconoclasm, whether screamed
from Marshall amps or mic-ed up close, feels ever more powerfully infused with his
unique breadth of illness and essence.
These songs represent the two sides of J.T. - and while they emanate from the 80s,
they find themselves potently renewed in the polarized world of today, making ‘The
Future’ a worthwhile destination for everyone who ever had a heart touched by the
transgression and freedom promised by rock & roll.

Formed in 2014 in Chicago by partners Joshua Condon
and Eliza Weber, Glyders have kept busy, lighting up
shows around town and country ever since then with their
mystery sound, on the road when and where they could
from here to Europe, taking time also to self-release a
couple of EPs (‘DIM’ and ‘Lend a Hand’).
 Fuelled by Josh’s spectral vocals and the liquidity created
by his guitar and Eliza’s bass, Glyders’ mazy spacecraft
takes to the air from the empty parking lot out back of the
roadhouse and finds in its arc an anodyne of the trippy and
the wiggy / ghostly places lost and found. Glyders have it
both ways, rocking the white line with fervour but also
stopping to soak up the fragrance of the purple sage and
the queen of the night by the side of the road.
 They’ve cut their records at home, with Josh delving deep
in the pleasures of analogue recording, finding the
embodiment of their subterranean fascinations with twists
and turns of the dial in a space they’ve dubbed the Juicy
Lagoon. Steeped in the pop and psychedelic enigmas of
rock and roll yore, the buzzing of tubes and transients and
uncontainable rumble, Glyders make it shake and live in
front of the tape machine and real audiences alike with a
flexible, expansive palette of sounds and a tight bunch of
songs.
 For their first vinyl full-length, the watchword, as ever, is
‘maximal minimal’. These kids are up around the bend and
in it for the long haul. After a few line-up shifts over the
years, they’re settled down with drummer Joe Seger and
are fixing their sights on the far horizons. If you see
Glyders choogling down the track, pull up and get set for
‘Maria’s Hunt’.

Bill Nace"s Through a Room represents a seismic progression from Both, his startling 2020 debut solo LP for Drag City. Nace"s career has been defined by a relentless probing of ways to frame the complex menu of human emotions, and that the guitar has been his primary tool for exploring this terrain is of little consequence. On this new release, he also employs tapes, hurdy gurdy, doughnut pipe, quelle est belle, as well as his latest instrument of choice, taishogoto. This is also, ultimately, insignificant. What matters is the discerning spirit which animates his work. The tracks are carefully built from loops and phrases that talk to each other, subsume one another, overlapping and crashing and diving and expanding and emerging into unimagined vistas. On the whole, the record offers a fascinating and engrossing chronicle - a sequence of interrelated stories told by a temporally dislodged narrator. You think you"re here, then you"re there, and then you go through trapdoors and along tunnels, into cellars and secret rooms, and you find that actually you"re back where you started. But it"s not hard to follow. Trust me. Nothing this enticing can be hard to follow. The record was recorded and edited in Philadelphia during the uncertain summer of 2021 with engineer and co-producer Cooper Crain. Where Both was a chiseling down of spontaneous live performance, Through a Room, while obviously the work of the same artist, treats its sounds as building blocks, combining them to mesmerizing effect. What"s striking is the poise, the degree of authorial intensity. The false dichotomy of composition and improvisation is thoroughly and rightfully abolished. Bill"s interests range from post-punk to post-industrial to hip-hop to free jazz to avant-garde composition, and every area between such unhelpful labels. From the inscrutable, evocative track titles to the enticingly baffling cover art by his longtime compatriot Daniel Higgs, Nace is guided by an ineffable, internal muse, a persistently personal stormcloud of ideas that, ultimately, comprise that thing we call art. Here"s the real deal. - Matt Krefting, Holyoke, 2022

It’s almost four years since their last opus - two years since the most-recent run
of live shows. Now, Bitchin Bajas return from whatever kind of rare ether they
occupy when they’re at home, bearing the riches of the whole cosmos in their
hands. And strictly OG as well - on cassette only.
 ‘Switched On Ra’ is the outcome of a typical Bajas exercise: pouring some out
for the pioneers that came before (as they’ve done with Bitchitronics and their
participation in the annual Chicago performance of ‘In C’ over the years). It’s a
nice way to get a flow - they play a little of themselves, then some for the
pioneers, then a little more for the band. Before long, they’re playing with the
inspirations twined, as they can only come from within.
 For ‘Switched On Ra’, this meant a deep delve into the song-book of one of their
soul-predecessors, Sun Ra, whose music is literally written in the Bajas DNA.
Digging into this music sounded wild on paper: the drone synth group taking on
the Arkestra harmonies and Ra’s loose grooves? The trick was to get that sense
of rhythm to translate across the spectrum from Ra to Bajas, in a way that
worked for them both.
 Their rearrangements of the tunes went good - up and down the EQ band, they
were finding the round sounds and jagged edges that brought Ra’s music into
their own thing. Then at the last minute, there was another twist - why not pay
tribute to the Queen herself, and think of the arrangements with a Wendy Carlos
vibe? A little side homage? After all, ‘Switched on Bach’ was visionary, bringing
analogue synths from the outside all the way into the mainstream in the late 60s -
and this take on Ra is meant to take him to new ears everywhere.
 Sun Ra of course was his own kind of original keyboard visionary, using electric
keyboards in the late 40s and 50s to fill a role in jazz that had traditionally been
played on acoustic piano only. Once he’d done so, he took his writing in
directions inspired by the electricity, places no one had thought to go before
then.
 Bitchin Bajas have been content to dominate in a microtonal world, usually
without a single chord to be found anywhere. But here, they step up righteously,
their vibe triangulated as they bring Ra’s music forward with some Wendy C
style, making an unexpected space for all to thrive. There’s a real feeling of joy
as these collected signals bounce off the tape and through the speakers into
your space.
 To get this unique colloid exactly right, Bitchin Bajas used nineteen different
keyboards. They abstained from deploying their arsenal of reed and woodwind
instruments: everything had to be on the keys. This meant Yamahas, Rolands,
Korgs, Casios, a MicroMoog and of course their trusty Ace Tone organ. They
even broke out the Crumar DS-2, to have some of Ra’s chosen tone in the mix.
Then Jayve Montgomery added an EWI as a solo voice on a few tunes, just to
get some air-blown signal (and a natural shout out to EWI master Marshall Allen)
in there, after all. It felt like somewhere in the universe, Ra was decreeing it.

Since 2014, Wand have made five albums (and an EP) in the studio and a living playing on the road. Business/pleasure: the two sides of their (multiverticed, decagon) coin, flipping in the strobe light of ongoing self actualization. And yet, by doing both at the same time-making a record of them playing live-they"ve now made their best one yet. How do you get Spiders In the Rain? Start by going all the way back to January 2020. Do you remember? Wand do. They"d been touring Laughing Matter for ten months. They"d done the coast, spanned the country, crossed the water twice, came back home and kept on going...driving, flying, occasionally floating (or maybe just thinking they were?), always on to the next town. They did all kinds of shows-clubs, ballrooms, festival gigs with no roof overhead-the songs expanding and contracting according to the dimensions of each day. Seventy-nine shows, and everything that was involved-the miles that ran beneath them, the different places and people everywhere, the music as it reathed, making everyone change every night-alchemized the band, and they drove deeper into their far horizon than they"d ever previously gone. The essential truth of the live vibe-that it"s always better when everybody"s here-was clear, so they booked a few shows more in Cali, from L.A. up to Marin. They brought along light and projections from The Mad Alchemist Liquid Light Show and Mike Kreibel and Zac Hernandez too, to tape everything-to get the big-deck energy out of performances in S.F. and L.A., but also to draw it out of the margins in Sacramento, Novato and Big Sur. It all happened, too. Everyone brought their experience. Packaged sumptuously with artwork from Sam Klickner, Spiders In the Rain is an arc of natural beauty and man-made abstraction inside and out, on an epic scale. Wand are orchestra and machine on Spiders In the Rain, one with the audience, able to get inside any dimension of their sound, whether its songs from their second album or their last one.

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 Agee, 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!

For their Drag City debut, the enigmatic duo expand into eight-armed wonder; all the better to reach ever-deeper into their bag o' tricks. Slinky and sliding elegantly, the kids forge tunes with a harmony of ambiguity and nostalgia, effortless yet precise, and rounded with thick bottom - a dancing clash of cognition and dissonance! Since 2015, Kamikaze Palm Tree have been a relative mystery. Now, in times no less mysterious, Drag City welcomes them, celebrating the energy of their second LP, where KPT play their offbeat strain of 21st century rock. Making MINT CHIP, Dylan Hadley and Cole Berliner reach deeper into their bag of tricks than ever before, dialoguing with an absurd shared intent they haven't yet paused to question. The off-center pieces gathered together for Good Boy have given way to pulsing aquatic compositions on MINT CHIP. Cole's guitar tones, wire thin, bell-like, bluesily downtuned, slinky and sliding elegantly, arc purposeful around their peripherals. Dylan's kit work, effortless yet precise, grounded with heavy bottom, drives and interacts organically with all the emerging structure, nailing down finely detailed frames and canvases to backdrop her singing and the unremitting landing of melodies and songs. With the addition of Josh Puklavetz, things that didn't make sense before - like bass - are now on the beach, fully lotioned, essence to essence. Violin and clarinet (Laena Myers Ionita and Brad Caulkins, respectively) round out the tonal spectrum. All strung together in the foothills of Altadena's Wiggle World Studios with Hartling back in the engineer's seat and Tim Presley producing the proceedings!

Tossing down straight acoustic shots with electric guitar back, Hello, Hi rides through the valley of yer ol' Canyon legends, finding an isolated place to unspool Ty's copious reserves of nervous energy beneath an open sky. Swarms of harmony vocals caper among the clouds, but there's a rider on the horizon behind, with crossbow trained on his very own heart - the engine driving all the relationships of life, whether down Broadway or over the cliffs at night! Whatever doesn't get killed is getting stronger all the time. A lean, mean deal, baked in saltwater and sunlight, compassion pouring out it's beautiful blue eyes.

40-plus years since its original release, the pop-punk-new wave inventions of Anthony
Moore’s ‘Flying Doesn’t Help’ are freshly remastered, blasting the sparkling, angular
sounds into today with perfect vitality.
 After spending the early years of the 1970s making experimental music first as a solo
artist, then with Slapp Happy and Henry Cow, 1976’s ‘OUT’ sessions had reinvigorated
Anthony’s youthful love of the naive pop melodies of pop radio, the undeniable excitement
of songs. While ‘OUT’ ultimately went unreleased at the time, the iconoclasm clouding the
late ’70s air was addictive and transformative for Anthony. England seemed to be roiled
as violently as it had been in counter-cultural days a decade earlier; the UK pop charts
breathlessly reflected the changing spectrum with equal parts aging hippie and prog
delicacies alongside new ascendant sounds: rough-hewn pub and punk rock, plus dub
reggae and disco and ska and Stiff and Krautrock. This proved to be an ideal environment
for Anthony to make records by exploring, as he puts it, the “deep connection between
minimalism, repetition, working with tape and celluloid and forming the modules of a
three-minute pop song.”
 Caught up in a no-holds-barred era, Anthony was more than happy to play the out-of-hishead madman, raving through outrageous exchanges with the press, while ‘Judy Get
Down’ received Single Of The Week honours from the NME (with review penned by Brian
Eno). Represented by Blackhill Enterprises, Anthony did production work throughout
1978-1979, on Kevin Ayers’ ‘Rainbow Takeaway’, Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s ‘Angel
Station’ and the first This Heat album, meanwhile cutting his own songs on a dead time
deal at Workhouse Studio with engineer / producer Laurie Latham. Through the wee
hours of countless nights, the two pieced together ‘Flying Doesn’t Help’, with a little help
from friends (an inspired bunch, including Bob Shilling, Charles Hayward, Chris Slade,
Robert Vogel, Festus, Matt Irving, Sam Harley, Bernie Clark, Edwin Cross and Martine
Moore on the telephone).
 Building upon the axis of pop and experimental impulses that distinguished ‘OUT’, and
informed further by the raw sensibilities exploding everywhere, ‘Flying Doesn’t Help’
blasts out of the speakers with its own unique blend of sophistication and aggression,
Anthony’s keyboard flashes between arpeggiations and outright stabs among the noise of
slicing guitars, funk basslines and the reverbed blare of the drumkit. Opening with
Anthony’s greatest hit, ‘Judy Get Down’, and containing a noise-laden remake of the
Slapp Happy/Henry Cow number, ‘War’, among other delightful sweet-and-salty
confections, ‘Flying Doesn’t Help’ never stops moving, fuelled with raw outrage and dark
satirical intent, churning with the energy of next-gen types like Tubeway Army and DEVO,
while shimmering with the elegance of the still-challenging old guard types, like Cale and
Bowie.
 Clearly, ‘Flying Doesn’t Help’ was steeped in the time, and the original release reflected a
deep mistrust of the corporation mindset. Information was a dubious concept, and
connections to any recognizable organization were seen as untrustworthy, so facts like
musician credits were left out of the package, and even Anthony’s name was altered (he
was credited as A. More on the album and Tony More on a single release). The label
name QUANGO was conceptual as well, standing for ‘Quasi Autonomous NonGovernmental Organization’; each record was sealed with red tape that the listener was
required to cut through in order to get to the music. Rather than recreate the conditions of
the original release of ‘Flying Doesn’t Help’, this reissue instead embraces the changed
environment of the current time and place: instead of no credits, now they are complete,
with Anthony’s full name restored and even the artwork subtly ‘relocated’ to reflect a new
set of relationships. All of which brings the forward-looking sounds of ‘Flying Doesn’t Help’
into the more independent-minded 21st Century syntax where it belongs.

 Ty Segall meets a new non-rock challenge head-on; soundtrack music for
Matt Yoka’s compelling documentary film ‘Whirlybird’. A variety of synth
sounds, electric keyboards, drums, percussion and saxophone (and yeah, a
few guitars) form a shifting impressionist counterpart, instrumental music that
dialogues with and serves to frame the film’s compulsive themes and
images.
 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 oftenreckless 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 OJ
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 unravelling
marriage as they singlehandedly 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 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 colour 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.

Box set of seven 7”s containing three unreleased tracks, plus remastered songs originally released on the Sinai, ZamZam and Drag City labels.

 With their duo debut, Dean Spunt and John Wiese invite you to experience
the frenzy of percussive space and discreet sound found inside ‘The Echoing
Shell’.
 This is the first official collaboration between the two veteran music-makers,
though their connection goes back to 1999. As John recalls, “Dean was in a
high school arts program at CalArts. A friend and I were recording the first
Sissy Spacek demo in the design studios there, and taking a tape to my car
over and over again to check the mix. Dean was walking through the parking
lot with a Locust shirt on, we said hello, and he immediately got into a car
with two strangers to ‘listen to a tape’.”
 The tape-listening ended well, apparently. Dean and John became friends
and fellow travellers in LA circles and beyond: in 2005, John did a remix for
Dean’s first band, Wives; in 2007, Dean played percussion with Sissy
Spacek’s 13-Tet Los Angeles; John toured with No Age several times and
collaborated live with them in 2010.
 Under the Sissy Spacek name as well as his own, John’s recordings for his
own Helicopter label and many others kicked things off for him around the
end of the century; since then, he’s been constantly engaged in solos and
collaborations on record, performances, and installations around the world.
 In addition to Dean’s ever-growing discography with No Age, he curates his
own label, Post Present Medium. In 2018, Radical Documents released
Dean’s solo debut ‘EE Head’, which explored concrète and experimental
techniques in a four-part, album length piece.
 ‘The Echoing Shell’ is born of Dean and John’s shared understanding, using
John’s process common to Sissy Spacek: elaborate sound-collage works
using source material originating from punk, hardcore and improvised music.
A series of impositions, tape manipulation and edits recompose the material,
cracking open the crust of the source, freeing its implied guts to steam forth
in gushes of extreme noise. On ‘The Echoing Shell’, this is as often noise as
it is extreme intimacy, seeming at times to be sourced from within Dean’s
drumkit, at other times appearing to emanate from the capsules of
microphones and the circuits of the signal path itself.
 One may read these collaged sounds as abstraction, but there is a unique
language conveyed in their assembly, forming something like word-shapes
and meaning. And intention: the two side-long pieces, comprised of many
short sections, form a linear whole, creating alternately ripping and
discriminating music - and meaning - in the process.
 ‘The Echoing Shell’ is a fantastic conception in contemporary musique
concrète, combining incendiary post-rock power, dry humour and astonishing
depth of field. Whether projecting the sound through headphones, ear buds,
bookshelf speakers or your own personal amp stack, crank up ‘The Echoing
Shell’.

"A coalition of inescapable feelings and fabricated nonsense," is how Cate Le Bon described her fourth studio album, Crab Day. A few years prior to its 2016 release, Cate’s mother unearthed her birth certificate, and admitted to her daughter that they'd had her birthday a day off for nearly three decades. That sense of misaligned reality is the guiding force on Crab Day, where Cate establishes a strange, almost Dadaist lyrical scheme to make sense—or make more nonsense—of some unnamed life rupture that's left her grasping.

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 autumn and winter of 2020 -
2021 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. Favourite songs were chosen; players from around the Drag City
galaxy were messaged. Pretty soon, songs were flying back and forth -
music in the air.
 By autumn, the songs started to appear online: Bill and Bonnie singing a
song by someone they loved and admired; each song cut by another
artist they loved and admired, then sent to Bill and Bonnie 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.
 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
would 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 the best
memories are those where as many of our folks as possible were
together in one place at one time. 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.

Far View’ is a compilation of tracks from Joel Vandroogenbroeck’s series of library
music releases for the Coloursound label, a uniquely trippy catalogue of music
vignettes long overdue for their day in the library music sun, remastered from the
original analogue reels.
 The late Joel Vandroogenbroeck was among the rare breed of musicians who defy
all categorization, using music conventions to explore the far reaches of human and
cosmic consciousness. After passing through the jazz and rock worlds from the
1950s through the ‘70s, Joel found new outlets for his expansive vision in the ‘80s
with the Swiss library music label Coloursound. ‘Far View’ draws tracks from these
releases, which form a unique entry in the genre of library music. For the uninitiated,
this is just one way to begin a brilliant musical trip through Vandroogenbroeck’s
undersung career.
 A musical prodigy from youth, Joel arrived at Brussels’ classical Music Conservatory
in the early ‘50s, but his studies were curtailed by the revelation of jazz. Soon, Joel
was touring in groups around Europe and beyond with luminaries like Eje Thelin,
Stan Getz, Bob Brookmeyer and Zoot Sims. As time passed, his musical
consciousness continued to expand: time spent in Africa sparked a deep exploration
of the music of the Middle East. The new rock sounds from England, like The Beatles
and Jimi Hendrix, were mind-blowing. And from Germany came the krautrockers,
with something completely else again.
 Vibing on the eclectic energies of the day, Vandroogenbroeck formed Brainticket,
whose approach to composition fused jazz, rock and a mélange of global musical
traditions, combining a Western rhythm section and analogue synthesizers with an
astonishing array of acoustic instruments; ethnic flutes, sitar, harp, kalimba and all
manner of percussion. Steeped in diverse approaches of playing and listening,
Brainticket drew from prog rock and psych, traditional sounds and minimalist music,
all of which passed through their hands like the tributaries that formed the basis of
what would soon be known as New Age music.
 In the late 1970s, Vandroogenbroeck began composing for sound libraries, with
recordings to be used as underlay music in films, radio and television. Gunter
Greffenius’ Coloursound Library was formed in 1979 with an inclusive vision of
music, including experimental, progressive rock, and some of the earliest examples
of ambient music - styles not well represented in other libraries. Coloursound gave
Joel the freedom to create music in any style or genre, and over the next decadeplus, he embarked on a musical journey that is unmatched anywhere in the world of
library music. Working under the pseudonyms VDB, his output on Coloursound is
some of his most sublime and otherworldly - ranging from dark electronics to
imagined music of the ancient past to ethereal ambient sounds of the future, which
makes sense, as Joel’s records were always ahead and in and out of their time.
 Joel VandroogenbroeckJ passed away in in December 2019, while work was being
done assembling this collection. Curated by David Hollander, whose ‘Unusual
Sounds’ album and book of the same name delightfully explore the library music
world, ‘Far View’ draws from ten of Joel’s Coloursound albums with lovely cohesion.
Featuring brilliantly remastered sound, liner notes from David Hollander, album art
designed by Robert Beatty and reproductions of the Coloursound album jackets, ‘Far
View’ is an entry point to Joel Vandroogenbroek’s mind-bending body of work - sonic
soma to expand your consciousness and vibrate with the cosmos.

With ‘Harmonizer’, his first album in two years, Ty Segall glides
smoothly into unexpected territory, right where he likes to find
himself. Responding to the challenge his new songs gave him: a
synth-tastic production redesign, Ty kicks back with bottom-heavy
creativity, dialling 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 first recording to be released from Ty’s just-completed
Harmonizer Studios, ‘Harmonizer’ benefits from a collaboration
with Cooper Crain, who co-produced the album with Ty. The Venn
diagram of these guys unites them in DIY/punk dyed-in-thewooldom; Ty’s propers you know, but Cooper’s own unique
journey in rhythm, minimalism and DIY (as heard on his
productions with CAVE, Bitchin Bajas and Jackie Lynn) mines the
depths around Ty’s peerless vocal attack and aid in the latest
chapter of his never-ending search for unfathomably corrosive
guitar sounds.
 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-upwrong soul, to make it all right in the end.

In January 2019, at the invitation of fiddler Hans Kjorstad, Alasdair
Roberts travelled from his home in Glasgow, Scotland to Oslo,
Norway, where the two men convened with five additional
Scandinavian musicians at Riksscenen, Oslo’s centre for
Norwegian traditional arts and music. Thus newly-formed, the
group worked on arrangements of songs - self-written and
traditional - from Alasdair’s back catalogue, in preparation for
performances at Riksscenen as well as at ALICE in Copenhagen,
Denmark and the bucolic western Danish island of Fanø. The
group was named Völvur (The Seeresses), a reference to the
ancient Icelandic apocalyptic text Völuspa (The Prophecy of the
Seeress).
In January 2020, Völvur visited England and Scotland, to perform
with Alasdair Roberts at Cecil Sharp House, London and at
Platform, Glasgow, the latter as part of Celtic Connections festival.
The group had new material - freshly written songs by Alasdair
and several traditional Norwegian songs sung by Marthe Lea - and
over a couple days at Sam and Rachel’s Studio in Hackney, laid
down the music which now flows forth as ‘The Old Fabled River’.
The musicians who make up Völvur - Marthe Lea, saxophone,
clarinet and voice, Fredrik Rasten, guitars and voice, Andreas
Hoem Røysum, clarinet, Egil Kalman, bass and electronics, Jan
Martin Gismervik, drums, percussion and the aforementioned
initiator of the project, Hans Kjorstad on fiddle - are a busy and
artistically inquisitive group, involved in a diverse range of projects
with a wide variety of musical interests, from folk and jazz to free
music, modular synthesis, microtonality and beyond. They make
an ideal pairing for such voyages in the alchemical world as
Alasdair pursues in his own music.
On ‘The Old Fabled River’, Alasdair Roberts og Völvur meld their
worlds: fiddle and vocal styles formed in the Norwegian valleys
blending now with exploratory clarinet, saxophone and metallic
bowed guitar drones, now fashioned into baroque folk
arrangements. In one case, instrumental accompaniment is laid
aside, as three voices locate a questing fullness harmonizing
together.

 Eight years passes like nothing for Birds of Maya. Their fourth
album kicks out the Philly jams with every bit as much fervour
as their earlier releases - in fact, as it was recorded in 2014, it
kind of is one of their earlier releases.
 A long era of dull ringing and nothing else in our ears is over.
Once again, winds of warm guitar and humid thunderheads of
bass and toms rumble all around. With ‘Valdez’, Birds of Maya
are back in flight. And like the first song title explicitly states, this
latest is a soaring blast of riffers, rife with punk rock abandon,
sludge, treble, distortion, neck-throttling rock ‘n’ roll solos,
pummelling drums and bass and half-shouted/half-gargled
vocals, all of it half on and half off the mic.
 ‘Valdez’ was recorded in 2014 at Black Dirt Studios in otherstate New York. After a Purling Hiss session there, Birds of
Maya got a bunch of tunes they liked into shape - that is,
different shapes on different days. But nice shapes. Once they
got to the studio, they loaded in and set up, curious to see how
they felt playing in a different room. Pretty good as it turned out
- running through the songs that first night, they accidentally
recorded the whole album. Then they finished up the next day,
mostly. Trading the crushed harmonics of their basement tapes
for studio-grade mics, overdubs in the mix and only slightly lessbruised harmonics, their roiling essence not only survives but
thrives, non-stop, on ‘Valdez’, stuttering, screaming and
stomping through six circuitous numbers.
 At the time this was recorded, Birds of Maya were standing on
the other side of ten years kicking around town, suddenly far
away from the primordial ooze they’d flopped forth from. The
streets where all this had happened on were changing, with new
money rolling in, but they were the same old Birds, content with
their libations and ear-splitting variations on old favourite
Stooges chords. The cover art of Valdez is a couple of images
from those days, glimpses at the old grass roots before they
were ripped up by developers to build condos. But nothing ever
really goes away. ‘Valdez’ is a totem of the wildness that refuses
be tamed

Mind Maintenance is the new duo consisting of Joshua Abrams (Natural Information Society) and Chad Taylor (Chicago Underground Duo, Chad Taylor Trio). This is where the music begins, but Mind Maintenance can't be described simply as a summation of its parts and players. When you put on the sound, you'll know what we're saying - you'll notice how immediate and meditative it is; how simple, how "in the room," and how the natural buzz of each instrument sits remarkably well against the other. The percussive qualities of the guimbri and the mbira, so raw and unadorned individually, form with their shared resonance a soothing, sonorous whole. It's not about world music, it's not about jazz. It's about mind maintenance. The songs of Mind Maintenance exist in a zone somewhere between composition and improv. Based in melodies that unspool over time, they benefit from Chad and Joshua's intimately enmeshed sensibility and the intensity with which they listen to each other. Chad and Joshua have been playing together forever - or, if you need to think of it more tangibly, since around 1994. Based on our research, the pairing of guimbri and mbira is more than unusual - it appears to be without precedent! This is incredible if it's true, but more important to the music of Mind Maintenance is the shared ground of inspiration that both instruments occupy. Mind Maintenance pursue their inspirations on these instruments down similarly transformative paths. If some part of the 21st century isn't focused on destruction, but instead, locating a place where our traditions can work together in new ways to entertain and even ensure well-being, then that's just one more incentive for all of us to consider Mind Maintenance.

Bill MacKay and Nathan Bowles’ debut is well titled: keys are what they play
and keys unlock things too. Their trad bonafides are balanced with
inquisitive playing that adds surprise as a formal songwriting and arranging
tool. Spirited 21st Century folk music made of equal parts bluegrass,
classical, country, gospel and improv.
‘Keys’ is, on first blush, a collection of guitar and banjo duets - but from the
opening moment, it is clear that Bill and Nathan’s agreed-upon duo is a
living organism, growing as it goes. Behind the stately figures of ‘Idumea’, a
19th Century southern hymnal played out on their stringed instruments, a
low organ drone hums persistently, signalling that this music, while coming
from traditional places, is asking more of itself, seeking sparks of inspiration
to light the path forward.
Bill and Nathan met a few years back, if time has any meaning. It didn’t
seem to at the time - after the first night they hung out, it seemed as if
they’d known each other for a while already. A year later, in 2018, they
were booked as a duo at Cropped Out. Preparing for the show involved a
correspondence exchanging lots of provisional ideas, thoughts and music
back and forth from Chicago to Durham NC, then dashing through the ideas
again on the festival grounds an hour before the show. From this seemingly
hectic preparation, their playing that night was remarkably serene, a
spiritual treatise clothed in the casual and natural manner of the proverbial
porch, or in this case, riverside-jam, as the stage literally straddled the edge
of the Ohio River. It was a stellar, simpatico first moment that asked for
more moments like it.
After several more sets the following year, they felt ready to roll tape (as the
saying goes) and chose to do so in Chicago, with Nick Broste at The Shape
Shoppe. Again, an easy rapport prevailed, allowing them to work through
their collected ideas quickly and freely, with the moments of spontaneous
decision that can come only with comfort and trust in each other’s presence.
Throughout ‘Keys’, Bill and Nathan propel their power-folk engine with intent
and feeling, joy and solemnity, as images of wariness, wonder, anger,
deliberation, forgiveness, trust and devotion rise up from the music and roll
it forward into the unknown, a place we can sense both players are happy
to go.
Eight of the ten songs featured are originals, with the other two coming
from different centuries to this one. The diversity of song is matched by the
instrumentation: in addition to Bill’s guitar and Nathan’s banjo, they add
voice, piano, percussion, pump organ, requinto and electric organ to the
richness and rusticity, the traditionalism and open space of the
compositions.

The Peacers are back with their third album. The time has
been kind. Three years since they went about their
sophomore release, ‘Introducing the Crimsmen’. That
second Peacers record was made by the second Peacers
line up, after two thirds of the first gang made for the door
after the first album. In came Bo Moore, Shayde Sartin
and Mike Shoun but, after they’d finished making
‘Introducing the Crimsmen’, singer Mike Donovan moved
out of his old San Francisco digs to the east coast and
made two solo albums.
The Peacers were consistently great no matter who they
were, delivering Mike D’s irrepressible subterranean pop in
a full colour spectrum of moods from purple to blue-black
to sometimes white. ‘Blexxed Rec’ is a different time in the
band’s life - a second album from the same line up, plus
with a country in between them. Also Bo, who had one
song on the last one, brought three in for this one and
Shayde’s got the closing number. Suddenly, three singersongwriters under The Peacers’ flag.
The Peacers send out a mad variety of the thrills and chills
of modern rock, whether glam-tinged (‘The Thunder Is an
Electrical Love God’), psyched-out (‘Colors for You’,
‘Dandelion’), folky (‘Irish Suit’), riding the knife blade of
post-garage fusion (‘Blackberry Est’, ‘Ms. Ela Stanyon’s
School of Acting’) or pumping the winning strains of their
own pure pop sound (‘Ghost of a Motherfucker,’ ‘Bic Sitar,’
‘Make It Right’) and melting it all together.
Recorded in SF and Hudson NY with The Peacers’
production ear for small and curious detail in full spectrum,
‘Blexxed Rec’ is a blessed event for all you rock and roll
people.

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.

Lingering at the remains of a campfire before dawn, with the politics of the personal burnt into ash, running his stick through what’s left, Wand singer/guitarist Cory Hanson is reflecting on a series of moments in which he steps farther into himself, finding the ultimate big sky country on the inside of his skull. It’s a combination of songs and sounds that journey
through bleak and broken territory and places of sweet, lush remove and it adds up to the best record he’s been involved in yet: his second solo album, ‘Pale Horse Rider’.

 Cory’s first solo, ‘The Unborn Capitalist From Limbo’, was an intense affair, a grand experiment that produced inspiring,
nconventional music - but this time around, he wanted to breathe a bit easier, to feel that breath in the music as well. So he and his band drove out to the desert to record in a lowstress environment: Brian Harris’ Cactopia, a house surrounded by 6ft tall sculptural psychotropic cacti. They built a studio inside and then they made music and lived off pots of coffee and chili and cases of Miller High Life as they played guitars, bass, keyboards and drums in what seemed increasingly like a living biomech, their tech made out of fungal networks and cacti needles.

 It was loose and flowed onto tape well. Recorded by Robbie Cody and Zac Hernandez (who assisted on Wand’s ‘Laughing Matter’), the sounds were great from the get-go. First takes were mostly best takes. Fuelled with DNA lifted from country-rock cut with native psych and prog strands, Cory guided his craft toward the cosmic side of the highway, a benevolent alien in ambient fields hazy with heat and synths, early morning fog and space echo spreading the harmonies wide.

 ‘Pale Horse Rider’’s got a lot to get out of its mind, looking around and seeing that, on the surface, things don’t always look like much. A lifelong Californian, Cory’s naturally found himself standing to the left of most of the
country. The west may be only what you make it; these days, the roadside view looks exceptionally sunbleached and left behind. ‘Pale Horse Rider’ eyes the city, the country and the fragile environment that holds them both in its hands - a record as much about Los Angeles as it can be with its back to the town and the sun in its eyes; as much about
ostalgia as new music can be with the apocalypse over the next rise.

 On ‘Pale Horse Rider’, Cory Hanson moves ceaselessly forward. The old myths weave and waft, the shadows of tombstones flickering in the mirages and the light that lies dead ahead.

A guitarry hybrid of AZITA’s edgy rock / soul / R&B sound. Grooving good times, acerbic exchanges overheard in the street, shifts in community, the losses you will carry always, dark recesses late at night that echo with a wonder you've never felt before. Life.
All instruments played by AZITA; the wackest, most AZITA-harmonious sounding pop album yet.
For those who find the passage of time a one-way process of attrition, here’s good news for you. In the eight years since AZITA’s last long-player her fevered brain has barely rested and the proof is a new album of unbounded physical and mental activity, music and entertainment, entitled ‘Glen Echo’.
The worlds of the previous AZITAs have left their unmistakable essence. Her singular conception of pop music - the idiosyncratic songs, singing and playing that have graced seven acclaimed releases - is in verdant recurrence on ‘Glen Echo’, blossoming anew, cutting sharply in the spirit and image of her everevolving, always questioning style.
Writing and arranging on keyboards since the time of her solo debut, AZITA focused on guitars for this set of songs. Not simply for swagger or a fresh approach to soloing but as part of a way to elide expected singer-songwriter tropes, to democratically populate the sound-stage in equal partnership instead.
This is a key aspect of the ‘Glen Echo’ sound, one that determined another new choice - AZITA playing everything on the album herself.
Previous long-players ‘Enantiodromia’, ‘Life On the Fly’ and ‘How Will You?’ were achieved via close work with players and engineers who took the compositions from the demo to a finished form. Invariably though, something would get lost in the transmigration somewhere. With ‘Glen Echo’, AZITA comes through fully, jaggedly, most vividly, owning her intention entirely in the dialogue of singing and playing her rock and rhythm and blues.
The lyric sheet is riddled with language that circles, through the many moments of life, aspects of the passage of time, the pre-empted dreams and strangeness of the present and the way we invent an idealized past in response to the changes, guiding the narrative... where? It’s all banded together by AZITA’s wit, equal parts droll and dire, her dispassionate view of fates and outcomes for all of us here together on the planet, textured with unique, cinematic details and sudden dives into a deeply felt, utterly OG sense of soul.
In ‘Glen Echo’ are a multitude of sounds - all the moments in a life: the good time grooves, acerbic exchanges in the street, shifts in community and generosity, moments of loss you know you will carry forever, reflection upon unknown futures and pasts, the dark recesses late at night that echo with a wonder you’ve never felt before. You name it, AZITA’s got some sweet and sour theme music for it.

Just when you thought every loner folk genius had been outed/discovered, hyped, and pontificated about, a new/old challenger lurks in the murky depths of time...and Maine. Sure, you have your Skip Spences, Dave Bixbys, Stone Harbours, and Perry Leopolds already, but have you heard the lonesome sound of Bill Stone? Well, don't feel bad or "unkool", hardly anyone has--unless you lived in rural Maine in the early 70s and grabbed his barely-ever seen LP in the day. Titled simply Stone, Bill's mysterious album was pressed in the micro-est of quantities, covering wistful, airy psychedelia on par with the UK's Mark Fry's classic Dreaming of Alice, while still evoking the earthy, evening-hour melancholy of Leonard Cohen or Tom Rapp. Stone was also especially influenced by one Donny P. Leitch, one Robby Zimmerman, and much trad folk, while growing up in his hometown of Old Town, Maine. Stone started out playing in a few small folk ensembles while also moonlighting with occasional solo gigs, finally recording this lone platter in 1969 in a pottery studio (!?) on a 2-track Panasonic tape recorder in Boothbay, Maine (where he says, they competed with a cat in heat). The LP features Tom Blackwell/Bill Stone-guitars, Arthur Webster-bass, Bob Blackwell/Skip Smith-drums, Bill/Beth Waterhouse on vocals. It also seems cover artist Doug Bane went on to become an acclaimed cosmic painter--committing loads of animals, psychedelic scenes, and Native American portraits to canvas, who knew? But we digress--anyhow, seems Stone's solo career slowed down after marriage hit, and he transitioned to playing covers in bars for cash, but after acquiring a masters and doctorate in education, he moved into the teaching walk of life. Bill published books and articles on subjects as diverse as school counseling and chaos theory--but now retired, he's returned to music, even recording a new album of originals and traditional numbers, based on his experiences as a cab driver (another wrinkle in the Stone Saga we must hear more of someday - but for now check out). So with Bill back in action and the world slowly crawling out of a disillusioning haze, now seems like the perfect time for a first-time-ever reissue of this incredibly rare, happy-sad, gently delicate, Stone(d) classic of a downer song-cycle.

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.

Nuno Canavarro's Plux Quba hails from three decades in the past, yet the simple profi le of it's abstract/ambient/cutup collage makes it a record that sits quite comfortably in our IDM-informed future. In 1988, Plux Quba was a primal dark horse in the world of pants-forward electronic music - an obscurity issued with little explanation from the laid-back west coast of Europe: Portugal, of all places! - though the casual listener could hardly know that from an examination of the LP jacket. The vanguard of electronics in late-80s Europe was being pushed by organizations like Nurse With Wound, The Hafler Trio, HNAS - and yet, when Christoph Heemann came across this recording, it struck his ears and the ears of fellow listeners like nothing before. Plux Quba was handed around between the principles of the early 90s A-Musik scene: Jan St. Werner, C-Schulz, Frank Dommert, Georg Odijk, plus interested fellow travelers like Jim O'Rourke, to the intense curiosity of all. To ears that were already saturated with all things kraut, the dark corners of prog and the frontline of experimental and improvised music, it proved elusive. Not simply in how it sounded and how that sound was achieved, but in where it was coming from - like later Robert Ashley at times; certain stretches of melody recalled some of Eno's ambient pieces - but mostly, it was a completely alien soundscape!

CAVE are kind of beyond time. You might feel like it's been
awhile since you've seen or heard them but when you see
or hear them again, that moment will feel like 'Allways'.
During the making of the last album, 'Threace', CAVE was
in the process of becoming a quintet. They toured the
world afterwards, playing on four continents and eighteen
countries - as close to everywhere as they could get. Then
they took a minute. They recorded it over time, in Chile
and then Chicago. You can hear all of this, the energy of
liveness, the reps, and consolidating expanded possibilities
within their new alignment, the time away, the distance
and the freshness of returning to recorded sounds,
everywhere on 'Allways'.
In the past, much has been made of CAVE's use of
particular compelling tropes but their inspiration comes
from everywhere - Miles, psych, beats, exotica, library
music, rock, punk, the Germans, the New York guys too,
minimalists, the Dead, music from India, everywhere. This
is a bunch of guys playing rock-based music in a way that
pushes them forward from everything they've experienced.
When you listen to the new CAVE you hear guitars - lots of
them - bubbling under, scratching, fanning, locking in and
taking off, soaring on acid-washed wings, with keys that
pump, burr and whoosh in and out of the rhythms.
Half-speed mastering of 'Allways' at Abbey Road has
allowed the activity at all frequencies to present with a
liquid fullness and ripe detail. 'Allways' is a blueprint for
your ears to read and a map for CAVE to follow through
the world.

Ty Segall, precleared for flight in full rock congress with the band (Ben Boye/Evan Burrows/Mikal Cronin/Emmett Kelly), shifts Chrome. Songs of massive riffs, swung, tightly arrayed lines of fuzz & distortion, twin-guitar attack-and-parry, endopic keyboards kicking, precise & thudding power, a rhythmic core on the march in full BAND energy. The songs are lyrically allusive trips, dark passages in the labyrinth, everything in the air bristling collectively, as minds collide.

In the wake of the acclaimed Inland See, the on-growing analog ecosystem being animated for ten albums now by Bitchin Bajas boasts new high energy views. "Isle Peaks" speaks of directions in beats of time, weather and the heart to wherever coast they found themselves when they got it all laid out. Sourced from Inland See sessions, these cuts were subjected to further edits and tweaks, with electroacoustic textures of sampled kalimba, field recordings, autoharp and EWI to activate and transport divergent quadrants of the Bajas cinematic universe. The first two songs were previously released digitally on Qobuz in Jan "26. "Watch your Step" has been added to balance scales and acidity for the "Isle Peaks" vinyl edition. "Isle Peaks," throbs with the heat and humidity of an unknown landmass, ascending to signal-splitting heights on both atmospheric and ecstatic scales, the most wired ever but calm, then trancing ambiently in heavy modern electronic church thick with drone and atmosphere. High-energy music, first to dance, then to dream! The escaped & wild stepchild of Inland See is a half-hour highlight of the rest of your life to be: "Isle Peaks".

Sir Richard Bishop returns for a new sponítaneous six-string meshing of people"s music, recollections and psychic intentions. Are y"all ready for some Hillbilly Erotica? Migration from last album"s Ragas to this new Erotica is another chapter in Bishop"s progress, drifting via songs into the further frontiers of his pappy"s hometown sounds, trancing over and out in their hand-me-down clothes. As with the ragas, the "rotica"s hung round the neck of John Fahey"s infamous dubbing of certain tradiítional American folk sounds as "American Primitive." A perfectly good thought, but Sir Richard picks his own axe and chose a separate path. Rushing through gutters & picking pickled brains in the saucy head waters of the down-low & literal American primitive, his hillbilly music is a mash of brined cultural inheritance, mini-ragas and moonshine-drunk savagery breaking out on the frets. As a conception for Sir Rick"s acoustic guitar music, it"s a dynamite means and frame, centering his improvisations in a place overflown with pagan desire and unbound in deliverance. Here he flies up and down the neck, his manner less pristine, yet more exquisite, a flailing, flowing-on-the-river medley through stubborn whitewater turbulence, post-grass and folk"s classical gas. Anybody who takes a snort of this here Hillbilly Erotica will find a frankly spellbinding richness of intent and execution in their ear-mouths. And may thereafter find brain and blightness. It"s fine!

A two-headed, four-handed groove-and-space-based understanding & alignment of purpose laid out in pure BCMC DNA. Cooper Crain and Bill MacKay"s keyboard and guitar duo make unbridled electro-ecstatic, intuitive assembly of deep and wide trans-hemispheric sounds. Even if you only like Ummagumma, Nino Rota, King Crimson, Sandy Bull, Crystal Silence/Hotel Hello, you will still want to dig deep into BCMC"s Stash.