***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
***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 70s 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.”
LP $21.95
06/10/2022
**Drag City grandly presents Whirlybird (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), featuring all-new music by Ty Segall, created for Matt Yoka’s compelling new documentary. Released to great acclaim in Summer 2021, Whirlybird tells the story of Zoey Tur and Marika Gerrard, former partners and founders of the Los Angeles News Service, and deftly tracks their extraordinary and often-reckless pursuit of breaking news throughout the 80s and 90s—a time in which they pioneered the use of a helicopter to report on Los Angeles at its most chaotic, capturing historical moments like the 1992 riots and the O.J. Simpson slow speed pursuit. Working off notes and feels from Matt and responding to the images and story on screen, Ty crafted some of his most creative arrangements to date, using synth, drum machine, Wurlitzer keyboard, guitars, drums and percussion (plus saxes played by Mikal Cronin, who also cowrote the title track with Ty) to articulate a multitude of tones running through the film. For a shape-shifter like Ty, this apex of tone color is no mean feat, an achievement further highlighted by the full set of pieces. Rather than simply throw a bunch of songs-with-singing at the project, Ty’s score perfectly epitomizes the film’s ethos, providing an instrumental counterpart that dialogues with and helps frame the film’s provocative themes and images.
LP $21.95
05/27/2022
***With their duo debut, DEAN SPUNT (NO AGE) and JOHN WIESE (SISSY SPACEK) 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 mu-sic-makers, though their connection goes back to 1999. 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 ex- treme 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.
LP $21.25
05/20/2022
***An album-length excursion into sweet minimal groove / prog-jazz jamming from Oren Ambarchi's vast soundworld, the likes of which have seen release on Editions Mego, Häpna, and Oren's own Black Truffle over the years. Among many others! Oren and Johan have made two duo records and collaborated on a number of others, including playing together in Mats Gustafsson's Fire! Orchestra with drummer Andreas Werliin. This has a spacious, ECM-y feeling throughout, while the opening cut of the album features legendary Swedish composer/improviser Christer Bothén, on donso n'goni. Hypnotic stuff!
LP $24.25
05/06/2022
***Sonescent, the new album from Matchess, came to Whitney Johnson’s mind while she was at the Dhamma Vaddhana Meditation Center just north of Joshua Tree, during a course of Vipassana meditation. This is a ten day period that requires, among other codes of discipline, the practice of Noble Silence: silence of body, speech, and mind. As this practice settled in and around her, Whitney heard the things not always focused upon: first, tinnitus... then, breath- ing... the heartbeat, and another pulsing (something unknown, but familiar). So she listened to the sound of her body. After a time, her mind became involved, and she began to hear songs. But as she was keeping to her vows, she wasn’t able to write them down or sing them and record them. It was only after she’d returned from the desert that she wrote down what she’d heard, to the best of her ability. She decided to score the songs from the desert for other musicians to play, which was a departure from previous Matchess recordings, where she played and sang the music all herself. This process took a long while; first the scoring, drawing the pieces back out from herself based purely on memory. Then getting everyone together to play the music. Once she had them all finally fully captured, it seemed right to place the sounds back where they’d come from—a silent space, upon which the songs sometimes only barely intrude, as if heard from a great distance.
LP $26.50
02/25/2022
***The Blind Date Party hosted by Bill Callahan and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and featuring AZITA, Matt Sweeney, Alasdair Roberts, Matt Kinsey, Sean O’Hagan, Bill MacKay, George Xylouris, Dead Rider, David Pajo, Mick Turner, Meg Baird, Ty Segall, Emmett Kelly, Cory Hanson, Six Organs of Admittance, David Grubbs, Cassie Berman, Cooper Crain and Sir Richard Bishop happened online in the fall and winter of ’20–’21—but the party planning dated back to the spring of 2020. Stuck at home, with no gigs in the foreseeable future, Bill, Bonnie and Drag City needed an outreach program to keep themselves busy, not to mention sane. In the absence of any company or anything on the calendar, playing songs they loved was an idea; playing with people they loved, the desire. And making it fun—so pairing someone with someone else having no say in the matter, the essence of the blind date, was the plan. Favorite songs were chosen; players from around the Drag City galaxy were messaged. Pretty soon, songs were flying back and forth—music in the air!
2XLP $35.95
01/28/2022
2XCD $17.75
01/28/2022
2XMC $15.50
01/22/2022
***Rolling out of the mist and dust and silence of time, Ty Segall is behind the wheel of a sleek new ride, a confetti of pages torn from his ongoing saga blizzarding into the air behind him. With Harmonizer, his first album in two years, Ty glides smoothly into unexpected territory, right where he likes to find himself! Responding to the challenge his new songs gave him: a synthtastic production redesign, Ty kicks back with bottom-heavy creativity, dialing up a wealth of guitar and keyboard settings to do the deed. Harmonizer is a glossy, barely-precedented sound for him, and truth, it enraptures the ear—but in Ty’s hands, the sound is also a tool that allows him to cut through dense undergrowth, making for some of his cleanest songs and starkest ideas to date. Harmonizer’s production model couches tightly-controlled beats in thick keyboard textures, with direct-input guitar signal whining and buzzing purposefully from left to right. The Freedom Band appear all over the record, but often one at a time, their contributions leaving a distinctive footprint on the proceedings wherever they appear. Operating in this airtight environment with an eye towards precision, feel, and explosive mass, Ty’s crafted a formidable listening encounter—and once you get between the lines, the need to know more grows more compelling with every song.
LP $24.25
12/09/2021
CD $16.35
10/29/2021
MC $13.75
10/29/2021
***BACK IN PRINT!!! Note new price. JOANNA NEWSOM follows her Ys album with a new EP featuring a brand new song— “Colleen”—along with newly-recorded and arranged versions of her classics “Cosmia” and “Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie.” Recorded and mixed by TIM GREEN and The Plant in Sausalito, California with backing from the YS STREET BAND—KEVIN BARKER, NEAL MORGAN, DAN CANTRELL and RYAN FRANCESCONI.
12" $17.75
11/12/2021
***Mess Esque are a duo featuring music and instruments by Mick Turner and words and voice by Helen Franzmann. Their self-titled album is a beguiling travelogue of restless, somnambulant wanderings. Perhaps best known as one of the Dirty Three, Mick’s been playing guitar and making music with many collaborators for forty years. Around here, we love his paintings too—-but revere him especially for his solo music. Mick’s last record was 2013’s “Don’t Tell the Driver,” a work that found him departing from his traditional hermetic instrumental template by employing a rhythm section and brass charts and even collaborating with a vocalist. After all the purely instrumental music he’s made with Dirty Three and solo, a singer is now part of the sound he’s hearing in his head these days; while demoing new material, he realized that he was again writing music that needed lyrics –- and for that matter, someone other than himself to sing them. But who? In 2019, he was introduced to Helen through a mutual friend who’d produced her last album. Under the name Mckisko, Helen has released three albums over the past 12 years, working and touring with a range of Australian musicians along the way. Her music has been described as numinous and transformative. Her most recent album “Southerly” saw her moving into a more expansive sound which led to an openness and excitement around further collaboration.
LP $21.95
11/12/2021
CD $16.35
10/29/2021
***A new instrumental album of acoustic guitar playing from Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny! Everybody knows it’s been far too long since 2004’s much-beloved For Octavio Paz; even as the landscape has crowded with acoustic players, we’ve all been dying to hear Ben’s distinctive virtuosity again in this format. But The Intimate Landscape is so much more, KPM Music, the legendary British library music company, extended an offer to Ben to make some songs for their library. Well aware of their history, he immediately agreed. The field of library music (music made for hire, for use in placement in films and advertising) is one that’s come to public consciousness only relatively recently in the long century of record-making, but the influence of such records has been felt for years in the aesthetics of many diverse artists, including several who’ve recorded for Drag City. So it’s a special thing for Drag City, whose appreciation for Ben’s unique artistry has been borne out over a countless variety of releases, to issue this really amazing entry in both the KPM Music tradition and the ever-expanding Ben Chasny/Six Organs of Admittance ouvre. Ben chose the acoustic guitar for these recordings after considering the width and breadth of possible music he could make for the occasion. His approach while playing it was simple—deceptively so: to make music as present and immediate and beautiful as possible. This type of playing requires a deep breath before beginning, as it has to generate from within, as well...
LP $21.95
11/05/2021
CD $16.35
11/05/2021
A meetings of minds and cultures well-suited to the Alasdair Roberts’ syncretic fervor: responding to the invitation of Norwegian fiddler Hans Kjorstad, he found a group of musicians well-versed in folk, jazz and free-playing. Their diverse musics deeply inform this collection of Roberts’ originals and Scottish and Norwegian traditional song.
LP $24.50
07/23/2021
CD $13.75
07/23/2021
***Matt Sweeney and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy return with the follow-up to their Superwolf album from years back. The songs, then, go boldly into undreamed-of places, and go deep, as Matt and Bonny take all the musics they know to make songs that penetrate. In classic Garcia-Hunter style, Sweeney and the ‘Prince’ first work separately, finding a path to each other in their solitary imaginings. Bonnie lyric sets delivered to Matt spark Sweeney’s guitar brain; chords and a melody are shaped, recorded fast and loose and sent back to the Prince, then the two parties meet up to sing, stitch, strengthen and finally perform them together in front of a small unsuspecting audience. Then new sets of lyrics are sent, animated and played in a high wire style until the shared songs and experiences are ready to commit to record. This is just the beginning of their fusion process, as words imply vocalizations to counter and support, and guitar lines suggest harmonic fields to subtly push into. In this process, a new creature grows out of the old one. In this name of this partnership, the guitar shares an open and fluid space with the vocals, the voices sing with the guitars—every moment in the life of Superwolves is an extravaganza, guided only by its need.
LP $27.95
07/16/2021
CD $13.75
07/16/2021
MC $10.50
07/16/2021
***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, pummeling drums and bass and half-shouted/half-gargled vocals, all of it half on and half off the mic. For the good times as always, these Birds! That’s how they’ve done it: fast and heavy, hard, live and loose, amid accumulating piles of empties, in appropriately informal environments since 2004-ish, with their three LPs (on Holy Mountain, Richie and Little Big Chief) ripping us up whenever they drop. With each release, our thirst has increased, but to our horror, we haven’t found any fresh feathers from their tree in the new release bins since 2013. In the past five years or so, there’s been a couple gigs here and there, but intensities in cities other than Philly has always been a rare thing. And with no Ready to Howl 2 on the schedule, you MUSTA wondered... were these an extinct Birds? Nah! Somewhere in Philadelphia, Jason Killinger, Ben Leaphart and Mike Polizze played on—preferably outside—but wherever, really. Still making it happen as always: taping everything they play—with bass, drums, guitar and vocals fighting for space in the condensing mics of cheap recorders—then tossing the...
LP $21.75
06/25/2021
***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.
LP $25.95
06/18/2021
CD $13.75
06/18/2021
***Mind Maintenance is the duo of Joshua Abrams playing guimbri and Chad Taylor on mbira. This is where the music begins, but Mind Maintenance can’t be described with a summing of parts and players. It’s not about world music, it’s not about jazz. It’s about mind maintenance. When you put on the sound, you’ll know what we’re saying. How immediate and meditative it is. So simple, so in the room. The natural buzz of each instrument sits remarkably well against the other. The percussive qualities of each, so raw and unadorned individually, form with their shared resonance a soothing, sonorous whole. The songs of Mind Maintenance exist in a zone somewhere between composition and improv. Based in melodies that unspool over time as they move between the two instruments, they benefit from the players’ intimately enmeshed sensibility and the intensity with which they listen to each other. Chad and Joshua have been playing together since around 1994. Sticks and Stones was their first band. They played together on the session for the O’Rourke-produced Alan Licht/Loren Mazzacane-Connors album Hoffman Estates in ’98. They live in different cities, but play together whenever they can—whether it’s with Sam Prekop, Natural Information Society or Joe McPhee. Or just a jam. After trying out the guimbri–mbira combo for a show at Chicago’s MCA, they made Mind Maintenance a thing.
LP $29.95
06/11/2021
***Keys, the debut album from Bill MacKay and Nathan Bowles, 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, signaling that this music, while coming from traditional places, is asking more of itself, seeking sparks of inspiration to light the path forward.
LP $23.95
04/09/2021
CD $13.75
04/09/2021
***An electrical tension enters the room—a guitar, left to its own devices, is surfing the breeze. Breaking in the air, smiling from ear to ear. Bicoastal, even! Suddenly, The Peacers are back with their third album. The time has been kind. Three years since they went about their sophomore affect, Introducing the Crimsmen—but you know how it is in these important years, everything changing. Lots goes down, lots to go back through later. That second Peacers record was made by the second Peacers lineup, after 2/3rds of the first gang made for the door after the first LP. In came Bo Moore, Shayde Sartin and Mike Shoun—but after they’d finished making Crimsmen, singer Mike Donovan moved out of his old San Francisco digs to the east coast and made two solo albums. So, who êtes vous this time, The Peacers? Check the ‘Better Than Ever’ box, that’s who! Up til now, The Peacers records were consistently great no matter who they were, delivering Mike D’s irrepressible subterranean pop in a full color 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 lineup, plus with a country in between them. 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 yer rock and roll people.
LP $23.95
03/26/2021
***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 guitars-and-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...
LP $23.95
03/19/2021
***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 and Bill Stone on guitars, Arthur Webster on bass, Bob Blackwell and Skip Smith on drums, and Bill Stone and 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...
LP $26.95
02/12/2021
***Broken nation time! Dark skies over our days, an increased reliance on black-market products. Wanna buy some 5-year old sunshine? With 2020 hindsight, it’s looking pretty good... Smash-cut to 2015. Two boys with guitars on their chests, stretching songwriting muscles and finding, to their delight, new possibilities at every run up the neck—a new normal every second. 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. Almost like a form of instant nostalgia for the world that that would soon be ‘used to be...' “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?” But it doesn’t matter. These lost songs are found again, and we feel the same! The pure sounds of yesterday (you know, actually five years ago, but it feels like it, doesn’t it?) are bright like a moment in time just waiting for its chance to exist, a nugget of potency landing right between the...
10" $15.50
02/12/2021
***The Silence continue their singular journey to known and unknown places in the musical universe on their fifth album, Electric Meditations. On their second record as a quartet, they distill the expansive nature of the original quintet into a guitar-bass-and-drums plus woodwinds combination, an especially rocking sound from beginning to end, which suits the new songs. Recorded in an all-analog process at GOK Studios in Tokyo, the sounds on Electric Meditations are a measure of the The Silence’s soul. The title track, which drives for nearly eight minutes off a deadly two-chord riff, exemplifies this quality, descending to great depths and expanding immeasurably from minimal to maximal, finding blues and hard rock vibes in the process.
LP $27.85
11/27/2020
***“Rock and roll was a relief after the rigor of Henry Cow.” That was one of the thoughts in Anthony Moore’s brain in the late summer of 1975. Of course, leaving Henry Cow had meant the dissolution of the band he’d founded, Slapp Happy, as the two groups had essentially merged over the previous year. Still, there was plenty yet to do with music, and based on Anthony’s propensity for odd left turns, a solo career in the pop world seemed like a fine way to follow up his prior excursions in tape-based modern composition, writing soundtracks for experimental films, avant-pop and experimental rock. Managed and published by Blackhill Enterprises, Anthony signed a solo deal with Virgin—and while the music he recorded for OUT didn’t see release upon completion in 1976 (and wasn’t released at all until a CD issue of the late 1990s), we’re finally getting those historic recordings for OUT on vinyl after all these years, with the long-lost original artwork restored. It is worth the wait — an absolute lost chapter from mid-70s, proto-new wave Britain, bringing to mind the bright and subversive sounds of Eno, Wyatt, Ayers, Cale and so many other trail-blazers from that time. A fantastic joy to the ears!
LP $24.50
11/20/2020
***DOPE BODY are back on the line with their first album since 2015—and it’s got all the gnarly, bisected body rock of their great records from the far side of the teens. A decade plus from the audacity of their debut cassette, 20 Pound Brick, and four years after calling it quits, Crack a Light is about getting back to essentials. Essentially a power-trio with singer, Dope Body have traditionally excelled at projecting monstrously-voiced street music, artfully welded to the massive space of rock anthems, hardcore and metallic, hard-rolling funk, driven by incisively pounding rhythm and attenuated with guitar loops and FX.
LP $27.85
10/30/2020
***For his first record in….uh, well, just a little over a year (!), BILL CALLAHAN’s given us his first Gold Record. You could probably call the album “Gold Records” too: all the songs have a stand-alone feel, like singles, meant for you to have a deep encounter with all of a sudden, from the start of the song to the finish. And what do you got when you have a record full of singles—and let’s face it, hit singles, at that? That’s a Gold Record for you. From the top, it’s clear this is music with an affection for people, as Bill immediately slips easily and deeply into his characters. Among them: a limo driver, a watcher of television, a suitor, a man in a broken-down car, a reader of books, a Ry Cooder superfan, and in the closing number, a wanderer who “notices when people notice things”. The voices of the people, with their ups and downs, their loss and laughter. You can feel the love. Basics were recorded live with MATT KINSEY playing guitars, guitars, guitars and JAIMIE ZURVERZA holding it down “and then letting it go” on bass. Drums and horns were brought in for a couple songs. Spirits were high! Six out of the ten were done first take; overdubs, when needed, came equally quickly. Listening, one hears their intuitive cohesion coming together richly behind Bill’s titanic voice spread across the stereo spectrum: the gentle conversation of Bill and Matt's guitars, the subtle percussion of...
LP $24.25
09/25/2020
CD $13.75
09/04/2020
MC $10.50
09/04/2020
***A way station for a lot of young talents-in-waiting, BOX OF CHOCOLATES hailed from the still-forbidding borough of Brooklyn at the end of the 1980s, with their one album released at the dawn of the 90's. They contained multitudes, including indie-rockers-to-be, a motion-picture actor, a figment of early Phish's imagination, an enthomusicologist, a Honduran immigrant, a 2019 Tony Award winner and some weirdos too. Box of Chocolates took the cake and ate it too, as only happened in the freewheeling confines of the US '80s-'90s. The credits listed some incredible names—BRUTE RAKE, MICKEY HAWAII and WAYNE OLIPHANT, as well as MICHAEL HOWE, WILL OLDHAM, ARNIE WOBBLE, MICHAEL CHORNEY and ROB MILLIS.
LP $22.25
09/11/2020
***Five years after Tangier Sessions, SIR RICHARD BISHOP, we presume, is back from his travels around the world. With Oneiric Formulary, he’s dug deeper into his bag of extra-musical gestures from the eternal and unknowable, along with a few sounds we might recognize, all transmuted for our mortal ears’ enjoyment. The last couple of Sir Richard Bishop releases on Drag City were genre exercises of sorts—The Freak of Araby explored the musical legacy of late Egyptian guitarist Omar Khorshid while Tangier Sessions explored the sound of an obscure 19th century guitar that Rick had acquired from a mysterious Swiss luthier. The title Oneiric Formulary, may sit contrarily on the tongue—but we may refer to it as representing “a collection of dream states”—which means we like it! With such a lofty goal in mind and at his fingertips, Sir Rick returns to the approach of his DC debut, Polytheistic Fragments—a different sound, a different instrument, for nearly every track, drawing from the music of all nations, including and especially that infamous republic with only one person on the census roll (initials SRB).
LP $21.50
07/24/2020
MC $10.50
07/24/2020