Format: lp

Joseph Allred - Folk Guitar ()

LP Edition of 430. Bandcamp $24 A very nice return to unadorned acoustic guitar playing by one of the form’s masters. Allred’s last album for FTR, What Strange Flowers Grow in the Shade (FTR656) was more of an imaginary band outing, but Folk Guitar plays it straight. Joseph reports they’d been listening to a lot to pieces by 16th Century composer, John Dowland, and the solo work of Pentangle’s John Renbourn while this album was gestating. They also note Hammer Studio horror-film soundtracks as a touchstone for certain tunes, while others were inspired by the music in Chinese fantasy TV shows, and poetic fragments by Sappho. All of which means, this is another deeply considered and beautifully rendered set of… Read more »

Wednesday Knudsen - Soft Focus Volume One ()

LP Edition of 250. Download included inside lp. VOLUME ONE LP $24   Here is the vinyl we promised, consisting of the first half of  Soft Focus, the recent solo CD by Wednesday Knudsen. The second half may be along before the end of the year, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. This here is a solid foot of brilliant musical meditations that will fit snugly onto your shelf RIGHT NOW. The project was begun deep in the Plague Era, when it was hoped things might be turning better. It is virtually all unaccompanied work, apart from a little harp by PG Six on the first track. Wednesday displays her sweetly abundant chops on woodwinds, guitar, keyboards and vocals…. Read more »

Alison Cotton - Engelchen ()

LP Edition of 300. Co-Release with Rocket Recordings (UK) $30 Engelchen literally translates as ‘little angels,’ and for many in the febrile, dangerous era of the 1930s in Nazi-occupied Europe, as they wrote letters to arrange their paths out of danger as refugees, these were Ida and Louise Cook  Ida and Louise spent much of their early years in Sunderland, and in adulthood lived in a suburb of London with their parents. They were enormous fans of opera, and led relatively quiet and unfussy lives, Ida working for the civil service as a secretary and Louise as a writer of Mills & Boon romances under a pseudonym. Yet secretly these resourceful and eccentric women were using their musical obsessions as… Read more »

Myriam Gendron - Not So Deep As A Well (Expanded Version) ( / )

Co-Release with Basin Rock (UK)  LP – $25 CD – $14 Myriam Gendron’s stunning Not So Deep As A Well LP became something of a sleeper hit upon its initial release back in 2014. Her debut album shone a warm lamp-light glow upon a curious and captivating new voice in the Quebecois folk world. Nearly ten years on from its release in her native Canada and America, Not So Deep As A Well gets a European release for the first time which also features two tracks not included on the original release – ‘Bric-à-brac’ and ‘The Small Hours’ – both written and recorded in the early days of 2014. Recorded alone in her apartment, with no knowledge of sound engineering,… Read more »

Volksempfänger - Attack Of Sound ()

LP Edition of 300. Co-Release with Cardinal Fuzz (UK). $24 Cardinal Fuzz (UK) and Feeding Tube Records (USA) once again join forces to release this behemoth of an album! “Attack Of Sound” is an unapologetic swooning love letter to pop music. It’s the perfect album, where dissonant and harsh guitars are juxtaposed with almost bubblegum pop. Sheets of feedback over inept tribalism and sugared by amazingly sweet vocals. This album works brilliantly as Ajay & Holly show their innate love of classic 60s pop and psychedelia as much as the Stooges. The ghosts of Love and Phil Spector haunt the wasted grooves of “What The Girl Does” and “Damned And Drowned”, while the lurching punk noise mayhem of “How We… Read more »

Old Million Eye - Quartz Hive ()

LP Edition of 200. Numbered. Riso-graph cover and back art Printed at LOOKYHERE.  $29 Beautiful third LP helmed by multi-instrumentalist/tape manipulator, Brian Lucas. Following up on 2021’s The Incandescent Switch (FTR 606) and 2022’s The Air’s Chrysalis Chime (FTR 675), Quartz Hive is a post-pandemic swirl of cloud sound based on the kind of music that makes all your inner walls melt like wax. Lucas has a wonderful way of creating clusters of texture that circle the room, slowly accreting bits of lovely ambient sound that transform themselves from vague suggestions into full-blown songs without adhering to any logic other than their own. Some of the players colluding here are Old Million Eye vets, like Steven R. Smith, Sheila Bosco… Read more »

BHAJAN BHOY - Shanti Shanti Shanti ()

LP Edition of 350. Co-Released with Cardinal Fuzz. $24 – “Another fine release by Dutch musician Ajay Saggar. His basic thrust is modern psychedelia, minted from radio snippets, dubby reverb flapping, elegant guitar washing, electronic drones interwoven with flashes of mock jaw harp or sploshy drums, and a generally stoned atmosphere. And the concept is spectrally sound!” (Byron Coley / the Wire magazine…January 2023) – “a superbly crafted album” (Andrew Neal / Silent Radio) – “I just got your cassette and loved it! Who else could make music with such a cool range of instruments and styles and make it sound so…. Cool!” (Bilinda / my bloody valentine) I have wanted, for many years, to release an album again on… Read more »

Wake In Fright - Wake In Fright ()

LP Edition of 283 Co-Release with Police Records $25  Finely thuggish debut LP by a trio led by guitarist Micah Blue Smaldone, a well known figure in the same South Portland Maine scene that gave us Big Blood and other treats. Indeed, Micah’s fourth solo album was a split with Big Blood (Immune 2012), but the fingerpicking sound of his solo recordings is a far cry from Wake in Fright. WIF are a trio. Micah plays guitar, Greg Bazinet plays bass, Jonas Eule plays drums, and all of them add vocals. It was Greg who sort of got things going when he convinced Micah to record some demos in 2022. Because of the lousy quality of almost everything in that… Read more »

Nod - S/T ()

LP Edition of 510. Co-Release Carbon Records $24 What you hold in your hands is the first Nod release from 1992, now on vinyl for the first time. Originally self-released as a CD, a subset of the recordings were perfectly re-mastered by James Plotkin for this slab of black vinyl. During the “year punk broke”, this trio (and sometimes 4-piece) were holed up in a Western NY enclave, perfecting their craft of imperfections. A combination of studio and home recordings, this self-titled gem perfectly introduces you to the charming shambly rock which Nod has been creating for the past 30+ years. And after many self-released CDs and singles, and while getting “this close” with a stint on Steve Shelly’s Smells… Read more »

Village Of Spaces - That’s Understanding ( / )

LP edition of 500.  $21 CD edition of 400. $10 Having listened to this disk 20 or so times over the past week, I have been struck time and again by the gently naif quality of Dan Beckman-Moon’s songwriting. I keep thinking of Neil Young’s earliest solo tunes, particularly “Sugar Mountain,” as a sort of spiritual touchstone, although truthfully the music doesn’t really sound anything like that. Still, the emotional core of the material has a similar sweetness and simplicity, while managing to steer clear of mawkishness with a nimble delicacy that parallel’s Neil’s early work. I have come to think of Valley of Spaces as a collaborative effort between Dan and his partner, Amy Moon, but this album often… Read more »