***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.
CD $13.75
03/29/2024
LP $24.95
03/29/2024
***Stereolab's Laetitia Sadier issues a call to the traumatized civilizations of Earth: we’re urged to finally evolve past our countless millennia of suffering and alienation. Her songs score the complexities and harmonies within this directive: organ, guitar, bass, synth, trombone, vibraphone, live and programmed drums, and a vocal assembly of men and women billed as The Choir, working intricate chord/tempo/and dynamic changes, as Laetitia’s empathic presence leads the way.
CD $13.85
02/23/2024
LP $24.45
02/23/2024
***Nehan is a Japanese free improvisation & avant-garde rock quintet formed in August 2022. Their performances are initiated by a 9hz brain wave emitted from a testee who has been brought into a deep meditative state via either hypnosis or acupuncture—a very relaxed but very alert state. nehan doesn’t begin until the testee has gotten into the state of “nothingness.” It is only then that the improvisation can begin. The role of improvisation has been key to all the musical projects of Masaki Batoh. In 2010, as Batoh was winding down the activity of his long-stand- ing “heavy chamber folk” group, Ghost, he became involved in the design of a machine to generate sonic data based on brain waves. An acupuncturist as well as a musician by trade, his interest was spurred by the rhythms of the body and the brain, and a desire to access the “pulses” of brain waves to initiate improvisations. Following the release of Brain Pulse Music, Batoh toured Japan and the US, making demonstrations of his process using a local volunteer and guest performers, when available. Today, nehan arrive at their performance space prepared with a Brain Pulse testee, bringing a wide array of instruments including gongs, timpani, tabla and other drums and percussion, Crumhorn, bagpipes, mellotron, oscillators and additional sound effects. Their performance is a transformative electro-acoustic display that passes through the prism of music styles, from east to west, from traditional folk and classical to rock, jazz, and avant electronic. For the personnel...
LP $34.65
01/26/2024
***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.
CD $13.75
01/26/2024
2XLP $31.25
01/26/2024
MC $12.75
01/26/2024
***One of two early cassette-only titles from the renowned guitar improviser Tashi Dorji originally released a decade ago—this reissue marks it's debut on vinyl. “Guitar Improvisation and Tashi Dorji are the first physical releases of my guitar improvisations. They were put out by a small local, now defunct, label called Headway Recording in 2012 and 2013. The friends who ran the label had heard some of my guitar music and reached out to me about doing a cassette release. Guitar Improvisations was really my first recording of improvisation—in a semi-studio setting at my friend’s basement space. It really was a formative time for me because it felt like everything opened, as far as the possibilities of what music-making meant. Like improvisation walked in and then there was a volcanic eruption..."—Tashi Dorji
LP $28.35
12/08/2023
***One of two early cassette-only titles from the renowned guitar improviser Tashi Dorji originally released a decade ago—this reissue marks it's debut on vinyl. "The self-titled session was recorded at a nice studio at the local university here in Asheville. I had some friends that were studying music there and had access to studio time. This session focused more on extended/prepared guitar ideas. My interest in percussive elements of sounds, timbre, harmonics, and dynamics plays a lot in this recording.”—Tashi Dorji
LP $28.35
12/08/2023
***The curtain rings down on 2023, and so much more, with the proverbial “Opus You Didn’t Know You Were Waiting For”—a new musical from Erik Paparozzi and Gregg Turkington—and the first-ever Drag City Christmas/Holiday album—Neil Hamburger Presents Seasonal Depression Suite. Through the lens of various guests stuck in a perfectly average chain-hotel during the holiday season, wallowing in self-pity and paranoia, reliving personal catastrophes both real and imagined, or simply trying to use the hotel vending machine. Influenced by everything from Thom Bell to Tommy to the trollish misery of Trip Advisor reviews, Seasonal Depression Suite provides another entry in the sprawling satirical critique of America that Turkington has been engaged in with his multifarious enterprises and collaborations since the early 90s. Features an all-star cast including: Neil Finn (Split Enz, Crowded House, Fleetwood Mac), Annabella Lwin (Bow Wow Wow), Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls), Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, acclaimed singer/ performance artist Puddles Pity Party, voice actress Natalie Peyser, J.P. Hasson (Pleaseeasaur), enigmatic vocalist (and Frank Sinatra’s granddaughter) A.J. Lambert, Paparozzi himself and, of course, Neil Hamburger.
CD $13.75
11/17/2023
LP $25.75
11/17/2023
MC $12.75
11/17/2023
***In the time since the 2009 release of For the Whole World to See, happenings in the world of Death have occurred at warp speed. The raw rock ’n roll that the Hackney brothers made in the 1970s became a belated punk rock sensation, leading to shows and tours round the world, as well as two further compilations of old material. A documentary film was released in 2013 and an album of new Death music in 2015. Since a series of US dates in 2019, things have been relatively quiet externally, but evolution has continued, with this Death / Rough Francis split single representing the inauguration of a new phase in the Death history. Keeping it in the family and pointing toward the future has been a way of life for Death since the beginning. For this new recording, Bobby Hackney’s sons have joined Bobby and Dannis in the band they formed with their late brother David nearly 50 years ago. Urian, Julian and Bobby Jr. have made music under the name of Rough Francis since 2010, and will continue that journey while also making Death music old and new happen with their father and uncle. “World In Disguise” and “Haunted” are produced by Urian, who is gaining recognition as a drummer, artist and producer, playing with Converge, The Armed and even the Late Night with Seth Meyers 8-G Band in the last couple years, in addition to Rough Francis. Julian plays all the guitars in this new version of...
7" $19.50
11/17/2023
***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 INAGRM Studios in Paris. 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.
LP $30.85
11/10/2023
***Since 2011, MIKE DONOVAN's been a Drag City stalwart, first with SIC ALPS, then as a solo and with THE PEACERS—but MIKE "THE MIGHTY FLASHLIGHT" FELLOWS has been a behind-the-scenes figure at Drag City since the early early days, playing live and on record with ROYAL TRUX, SILVER JEWS and WILL OLDHAM. And in fact, Donovan first laid eyes on Fellows way back in 1994, at yer legendary Drag City Invitational (we’re a matchmaker, blush!)! A multi-hy-phenate, Fellows has contributed to releases from ENDLESS BOOGIE, PIGEONS, WEEPING BONG BAND and PRISON in recent years. So when these two rambling musicians found themselves in adjacent communities in upstate New York, Mike D brought Mike F into the process of his new solo album. There The Mighty Flashlight turned ON, bringing his recording, writing, performing and mixing talents to the tabletop with such a seasoned vibe that he bought himself real estate in the album title itself! Something usually reserved for characters of legend (like Kiss’s adversary The Phantom of the Park) or giants of Dub (King Tubby, Scientist, Lee Perry et al, amen). The two-Mike combination makes the fourth Donovan solo album one that hits all kinda high water marks for the most and the best of what he’s capable of/plus inclined to do. And MF wanted to hear something different out of MD’s sound—so it could only be a meeting of the minds in the end.
LP $26.50
10/13/2023
***With BCMC, Cooper Crain and Bill MacKay unite to create Foreign Smokes: provocalogues, equal parts east Africa, deep space, rock’s dreamy lyrical interior, soloed multi-track, remix, raga, new age fugue state, field recording, blues and beyond—gossamer-light avant-garde noir flowing into fire-and-icy jams, collecting bright shades and warm stretches of infinity drawn through the buzzy overdrive of this side of life’s strange and sunny days.
LP $24.25
10/06/2023
***Recorded circa 1995/96, mostly in John Fahey’s room at a Salem, Oregon boardinghouse, the performances on Proofs & Refutations prefigure the ornery turn of the page that marked Fahey’s final years, drawing another enigmatic rabbit from his seemingly bottomless musical hat, making delightfully confounding demands upon your listening (and thinking) ear.
LP $21.95
09/08/2023
***Finally! Vinylly! The Prison break of our dreams at long last. Freedom is the goal for Rockaway Beach’s very own state-of-mind jam band. Everybody’s got their point of view and one slamming riff at a time unites all of them: five guys, four vocals, three guitars melded together outrageously in a craft that runs on it’s own rock and roll synergy, and lots of it. Sure, it goes too far! How the hell else you gonna get Upstate? The Prison population changes with the seasons, and during the season this album was recorded, Sarim Al-Rawi (Liquor Store), Mike Fellows (Mighty Flashlight), Sam Jayne (Love As Laughter), Matt Lilly and Paul Major (Endless Boogie) were in Prison.
2XLP $37.50
09/08/2023
***After Math retails what becomes of the cast of characters introduced in Art, Mystery, joint and severally pursuing an erotic Rinascimento statuette attributed to Antonio Pollaiuolo, a pursuit that lands them in court. On the way, their collective and singular fates are unfolded and accounted for, the consequences of the truth of matters for them are brought to bear and a kind of rough justice is seen to have been done, as is appropriate in rough trade. “After Math begins where Art, Mystery, the first installment in Mr. Thompson’s two-part novel, left off. The chrome trader Perlat Tile has just witnessed the criminal Pablo Palbon attempt to smuggle a small erotic bronze by Pollaiuolo out of Tirana disguised as a funeral urn. The ensuing trial—described in After Math—pits the gallerist Ms. Jasmine, who wants to acquire the work legitimately, against the state of Albania, which also claims ownership of it. Written in the impeccable prose that we have come to expect from Mr. Thompson, After Math proves that what happens after a plot is foiled can be just as delightful as the action itself.”—Michael Sanchez
BK $29.85
09/01/2023
***Back from the silence from which P.G. SIX always emerges, the new album release Murmurs & Whispers is the first proper P.G. Six album since 2011’s Starry Mind. Time passes slowly, as they’ve been known to say out in the country, and before you know it, there’s a bunch of it behind you. After five releases in the first decade of P.G. Six, it may seem a bit of a surprise to have not heard something new in the past twelve years—but a cursory listen to Murmurs & Whispers will answer why, as the deep acoustic focus of the tracks imply an investment of the type of compassion and understanding that takes time and concentrated effort to conjure. Additionally, PAT GUBLER's always got a few pots going at once in his ever-expanding musical universe. He’s been active since the mid-90s, first with Memphis Luxure and Tower Recordings, then as P.G. Six, and as a member of METAL MOUNTAINS, WET TUNA, GARCIA PEOPLES and WEEPING BONG BAND. Additionally, some time was spent making collaborative records with Dan Melchior (in 2019) and Louise Bock (in 2021). Pat’s been playing the harp for more years than he’s been in bands, but when he realized that he was writing a set of songs cen- tered around harp compositions, he spent some time in the woodshed with his instrument, a late 80s model Triplett Celtic 34 String Harp (which replaced a lovely Paraguayan harp he’d played for years previously). After the previous P.G. albums of...
LP $24.85
09/01/2023
***Resolve acts in dialogue with the minimalist inspirations of the first Arnold Dreyblatt & The Orchestra of Excited Strings release, 1982’s Nodal Excitation—in effect, looking beneath the hood of several decades of progression to review and renew the revolutionary intent of their microtonal foundation credo. This new Orchestra—Oren Ambarchi, Konrad Sprenger and JoachimSchütz—combine effortlessly to explore new scalar dimensions. PLAY LOUD.
LP $21.25
08/25/2023
***An impromptu live show at Worship vintage clothes store in Los Angeles, serving as a rehearsal for an acoustic set that would be part of a TY SEAGALL And FREEDOM BAND record release show. Ty along with EMMETT KELLY deliver five songs and show no rehearsal was necessary.
LP $21.25
08/11/2023
***Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You is a tale as old as time. It’s an album. Its songs and music are by and for people together. For listening together. Before it gets too late. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy stands at the nexus of all the kinds of music he can summon, with friends, with family and community. All roads roll though him. There can be no holding back. A million billion moments are on the line. He’s gonna tell us about a world... Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You was recorded in Louisville by Nick Roeder, featuring Sara Louise Callaway on violin, Kendall Carter on keys, Elisabeth Fuchsia on viola and violin, Dave Howard on mandolin, Drew Miller on saxophone and Dane Waters’ voice.
CD $13.75
08/11/2023
LP $25.75
08/11/2023
MC $12.75
08/11/2023
***Emil Amos (Grails, OM and podcaster plus) decommissions pieces originally bound for the KPM library. A personal interpolation of ‘music for films (& television)’ expounds upon diverse sounds: synthy 80s soundtracks, contemporary hip-hop beatmaking, ambient music, and The Hulk’s “Lonely Man Theme”. Emil’s dark visions are full of noirish shadows and eerie neon glow—mood music for drug trips spent dreaming up new soundtracks to take drugs to!
LP $21.25
08/04/2023
***In addition to his day job transforming pop music with his own records, as well as those of Gastr del Sol, Loose Fur and Sonic Youth over the past few decades, Jim O’Rourke has been contracted for several dozen film scores over the years as well. It makes sense—his abilities as an improviser, composer and producer allow him to interpret cinematic moments with a unique understanding for their construction and how they work. It doesn’t hurt that Jim’s a well-versed cineaste, a complete and total fan of watching films, which has given him a preternatural understanding of the role of music in movies. 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. RIYL: Ambient, new age, mod comp
LP $21.95
07/14/2023
***Cory Hanson’s third solo LP follows upon 2020’s luminescent Pale Horse Rider, upping the heat to molten lev- els, six strings at a time. In search of further adventures, Cory draws with vampiric glee from the madness coursing through the world outside; a spiraling shitshow that’s reawakened a compulsion in him—an old ambition, even!—to crush brutality and elegance together into a fresh set of rocks to hail down upon us. Western Cum is a high-stepping, hard-dancing, first love/heartbreak, tonight’s-the-night, future nostalgia kind of good time—the sound of gui- tars through the speakers of luxury cars. Like the dream you had once, alone, asleep in an amplifier, blasting Guns N’ Roses through every last orifice in your body. And it’s coming through!
CD $13.75
06/23/2023
LP $24.25
06/23/2023
MC $12.75
06/23/2023
***REISSUED!!! At the end of the century, The Fucking Champs spread Total Music™ across the planet, touring relentlessly and producing albums full of undeniable note choices, sounds and songs. For III’s 25th anniversary, the band remastered the original master tapes, assigned John Golden to expertly cut lacquers and oversaw artwork restoration by forensic experts in Drag City's sub-basement. For the first time, this master stroke of musicality is widely available to an increasingly rock-starved public.
2XLP $37.50
05/26/2023
***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.
LP $21.25
05/19/2023
***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 spir- itual, constantly moving recital in open space.
2XLP $34.85
05/12/2023
***Outsider freekz, make with the haste! It’s time to get back to The Future—the one promised back when rock and roll was king, re- member? J.T. IV believed in the promise—and now, the mystery man behind barely-released private press 7" records of the ’80s like “Destructo Rock” and “Cosmic Lightning” and a film holding the Guinness record for worlds-longest—85 hours!—has been called back to our mortal coil, to live out his glittering, rapa- cious dreams once again. 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 heartbreaking 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...
2XLP $32.75
04/21/2023
***Shorty’s Ark is a book for young readers, a collaborative effort between singer Will Oldham and graphic artist Lori Damiano, based on work by Oldham and musician Matt Sweeney. Drawing inspiration from the story of Noah, Shorty’s Ark names and pictures a wild variety of species to inform and engage an equal variety of young minds with the diversity that can be found around this great planet of ours. The flood stands as metaphor for current impending changes in our planet, and the story works as a springboard for understanding concepts of interdependency, diversity and extinction. Colorfully illustrating as many creatures and their places as possible, Shorty’s Ark is an earth-affirmative vision meant to stimulate the curiosity and passion of those who encounter it. (STREET DATE - 4/21/2023)
BK $17.75
04/21/2023
***More in tune now with the rhythm of the sun and moon, Xylouris White speak to each other across great distances with the intuition and fellowship that can only be found over years in each other’s company. With fewer distractions, appreciative of the freedom to play with new sounds and spaces, they carve The Forest In Me from unbelievably thin air. Produced by GUY PICCIOTTO.
CD $16.35
04/14/2023
LP $20.95
04/14/2023
***Critically-acclaimed, criminally-overachieving Glasgow- based singer and guitarist Alasdair Roberts is known as a superlative original songwriter as well as an interpreter of traditional songs from Scotland and beyond. For the past twenty years, his recordings have alternated between these two complimentary poles, with ‘pop’ records such as The Amber Gatherers and A Wonder Working Stone nestling in his expansive back catalogue alongside “folk” albums such as No Earthly Man and What News (with Amble Skuse and David McGuinness). Additionally, all of these records possess a further dimension, derived from their collation of songs together into one album-length statement. This is part of Alasdair’s great achievement in his career—for him, this thing of music and song hasn’t come the eons it’s travelled to simply entertain. These impulses fully present and well honed, Alasdair returns to his roots with Grief in the Kitchen and Mirth in the Hall, his fifth full-length collection of traditional song. Recorded live in the studio, it is an entirely solo collection of twelve traditional ballads and songs sparsely arranged for acoustic guitar, piano and voice. The majority of the songs originate in Alasdair’s homeland of Scotland, with a couple from Ireland and one from Prince Edward Island on Canada’s eastern seaboard too.
CD $13.75
03/31/2023
LP $22.95
03/31/2023
***It’s 2023, and even the turn of century seems a long time ago now—but oddly, Purling Hiss’s guitar-band ethos feels ever more timeless, even as time accelerates and passes us in the outside lane. The Hiss aren’t just a simple part of the tradition going back 50-odd years. Their DNA, pulsing in waves of punk and classic radio rock, grunge and slacker, is ineffably, re-singably music—but their signature crushed guitar harmonics, fused with deep soulfulness, meld into something that cuts us with fresh heartbreak, an eternal recurrence that seems to be happening right now today, as it pours off the turntable and runs down the street. Drag On Girard, the first Purling Hiss album in six years, cruises through these states of mind and places in time—dreams from the past and the future, careening lawlessly as they slide around loose on the road, an ever-present youth in their roll. As before, but with new twists, Mike Polizze and his gang let loose with the chaos and noise implied by their name, applying high-end splatter and slow-rolling low end to eight vehicles, running the gamut from gleaming pop gems to head-cleaning epic jams before they’re done.
CD $13.75
03/24/2023
LP $21.25
03/24/2023
***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). Yet Furling is the album that most irreverently explores the span of her work and musical touch- stones. It showcases her natural tether to ’60s English folk traditions....
CD $13.75
01/27/2023
LP $24.25
01/27/2023
***"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, taishōgoto. 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..."—Matt Krefting
LP $25.75
11/18/2022
***A year after the cassette-only release of Switched On Ra, another format has fallen from whatever kind of rare ether Bitchin Bajas occupy when they’re at home. The LP edition of Switched On Ra bears all the same riches (only richer of course) in its grooves, adding a lovely screen-printed rendering of the graphics to its larger-than-cassette-cosmos dimensions. 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-predeces- sors, 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...
LP $30.95
11/18/2022
***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...
CD $13.75
11/04/2022
2XLP $37.25
11/11/2022
***With a band consisting of MATT KINSEY on guitars, EMMETT KELLY on bas and backing vocals, SARAH ANN PHILLIPS on B3, piano and backing vocals, and JIM WHITE on drums, BILL CALLAHAN 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.
CD $13.75
10/14/2022
2XLP $32.75
02/24/2023
MC $12.75
10/14/2022
***Extended guitar hero Oren Ambarchi returns with Shebang, the latest in the series of intricately detailed long-form rhythmic workouts that includes Quixotism (2014) and Hubris (2016). Like those records, Shebang features an international all-star cast of musical luminaries, their contributions recorded individually in locations from Sweden to Japan yet threaded together so convincingly (by Ambarchi in collaboration with Konrad Sprenger) that it’s hard to believe they weren’t breathing the same studio air. Picking up from the staccato guitar patterns that ran through Hubris, Shebang’s single 35-minute track begins with a precisely interwoven lattice of chiming guitar figures, expanding Hubris’ monolithic pulse into a joyous, hyper-rhythmic melodicism that calls up points of reference as disparate as Albert Marcoeur, early Pat Metheny Group, and Henry Kaiser’s It’s A Wonderful Life. Building from isolated single notes into densely layered polyrhythms, the muted guitar tones are joined by subtle touches of shimmering Leslie cabinet tones and guitar synth. Simmering down and funneling into a single note, the guitar stew is soon thickened by Joe Talia’s propulsive ride cymbal, which blossoms into a beautifully flowing yet rigorously snapped-to fusion funk, whose ever-shifting details skitter across the kit. An unexpected entry of guttural bass clarinet licks from Sam Dunscombe begins the series of instrumental features that pepper the remainder of the piece. Soon we hear from the legendary British pedal steel player B.J. Cole, whose languorous yet uneasy lines float in and out of a shifting rhythmic foundation supported by a single note bass groove, cut...
CD $13.75
09/30/2022
LP $25.75
09/30/2022
MC $12.00
09/30/2022
***First thought, best thought. Until the next thought: a guiding principle for No Age in the 16-ish 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. 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.
CD $13.75
09/16/2022
LP $21.25
09/16/2022
MC $12.00
09/16/2022
***"And suddenly! With a tactile clunk, Bajascillators bubbles to the surface. 'Amorpha,' a side-long shower of synthetic bells and bass, as patterns interlock and repeat and the beat within the barlines 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. And that’s how it goes—side by side, Bajascillators rolls four unique numbers that act on their own AND as extensions of each other, phases in perfect flow. Each time, as the needle cradles into the playout groove, you the listener are becalmed, in stasis, forever changed. Until you flip the side — and forever changes again..." (STREET DATE - 9/03/2022)
MC $12.00
09/02/2022
2X12 $30.95
09/02/2022
***Since 2015, KAMIKAZE PALM TREE have been a relative mystery. Now, in times no less mysterious, Drag City welcomes them to our tropical island destination, celebrating the energy of their second LP, Mint Chip, 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 their previous Good Boy have given way to pulsing aquatic compositions onMint Chip. Cole’s guitar tones, wire thin, bell-like, bluesily downtuned, slinky and slid- ing 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 SPENCER HARTLING back in the engineer’s seat and TIM PRESLEY producing the proceedings.
LP $24.25
08/12/2022
MC $12.00
08/12/2022
***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. 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...
LP $22.95
07/22/2022
CD $14.25
07/08/2022
MC $12.00
07/08/2022