***Earth Room is the self-titled debut of a new band making music in the spirit of electric-era Miles Davis, classic German space rock, and the “fourth world” studio experiments of Jon Hassell. The band is composed of three veterans of adventurous music in NYC: Robbie Lee on woodwinds and electronics, John Thayer on percussion and synthesizers, and Ezra Feinberg on acoustic and electric guitars. In early 2019 Ezra was asked to play a two hour set for a night called “Planetarium” at the Bushwick club Nowadays, where, instead of dancing, one Thursday each month people came to lie on beanbags. Lacking two hours worth of solo material, he asked John and Robbie to join him. The show featured wide-ranging improvisation, deep-color drones, and instrumental freak-outs, and left the bean-bagers beatific. A band was born. The three musicians got together throughout 2019 and pre-pandemic 2020, recording during off hours at Thump Studios where John is the in-house engineer. After the pandemic hit they got to work combing through these sessions, finding the juicy bits, seeing what worked, cutting the fat, peeling the onion, and tying the room together until there were no more overdubs or edits needed. The process occasionally included yoking one jam from one particular day on top of another from a different day, as on the elegiac opener “Bridges of Waves,” in which primitive synthesizers are fused with Robbie and John’s ecstatic drums and flute. The second track, “Within the Field,” is a study in percussive textures, and,...
LP $18.75
12/09/2022
MP3 $7.99
10/21/2022
FLAC $8.99
10/21/2022
***BACK IN STOCK!!! Received a 7.6 rating from Pitchfork. Recumbent Speech, Ezra Feinberg’s second album, opens with a lament. Named for the Robert Frost poem, “Acquainted with the Night” was written during one of the many devastating spectacles of injustice under our current regime. Repeating flutes and synths beam out of a low-end darkness, reflecting a collective sense of loss and alienation. Rising slowly, thickening with guitars and strings, “Acquainted with the Night” lifts off, and so too does the album from there. The second track, “Letter to my Mind,'' features the dynamic interplay of Feinberg's guitar with the loose and playful drumming of Tortoise's John McEntire, both pushing and pulling atop a looping bass figure. "Palms Up" begins with a lockstep pulse recalling early Terry Riley before jumping into an Ashra-like jam with Afrobeat accents. Side B opens with "Ovation," a tryptic with McEntire on drums which sets a wide lens onto a sweeping landscape, with soaring flutes, wordless vocals, and a hypnotic bassline played on a humming fretless that recalls classic ECM jazz-fusion. The piece plunges into an ambient, interior space before reemerging with a guitar solo fried through an old Space Echo effects processor, conjuring lidded Pompeii-era Pink Floyd. The album's title-track finale, "Recumbent Speech," features the magical pedal steel of Chuck Johnson. Unwinding atop a Balearic analog synth pattern, Feinberg stretches textures of Fender Rhodes and acoustic guitar around Johnson’s lyrical steel, with nods to Japanese ambient legend Hiroshi Yoshimura, as well as...
LP $18.35
06/26/2020
CD $14.75
06/26/2020
***BACK IN STOCK!!! EZRA FEINBERG, formerly of CITAY, is releses his debut solo album, Pentimento and Others via his imprint, Related States . After years of touring and several lauded releases on Dead Oceans and Important Records, Feinberg folded Citay in early 2012, relocated from San Francisco to Brooklyn, and stepped away from music. During this time he lost a close friend to cancer, someone who was an artistic mentor in Feinberg’s early days as a musician. He also got married, started a family, and, with mounting responsibilities, found himself questioning how to proceed with a life in music in the face of loss and with his years of freewheeling youth behind him. Through these seven tracks expansive landscapes unfold through cosmic layers of electric and acoustic guitars, pianos and synthesizers, all informed by ambient and new age hypnotics, 1970s West Coast psych, and the phase repetition of early New York minimalism, rounded out by a nod to West African acoustics. Feinberg and longtime producer and collaborator TIM GREEN (Joanna Newsom, Comets on Fire, Wand) have crafted long form pieces that take their time, seeking the pleasures and sorrows of the journey as well as the destination. Feinberg also recruited PETE GRANT, the legendary pedal steel player heard on records by The Grateful Dead, Guy Clark, and Tim Hardin to contribute soaring and plaintive textures to the album’s closer, “Experience Near.”
LP $16.35
02/02/2018