Format: lp

Spiral Joy Band - Elvehjem ()

LP Edition of 300. Download code included in jacket. BANDCAMP $23 Recorded in Madison Wisconsin a year after In The River (FTR 654), the latest record from this amazing trio (Troy Schafer, Patrick Best, Mikel Dimmick) breaks a bit with Spiral Joy’s drone-dominant tradition. There is a crackling, noise energy curtain surrounding much of the playing here that makes me remember the sound of the Richmond VA trio, Pelt, from whom Spiral Joy Band draw specific inspiration (as well as two members.)  The listed instruments are bowed gong, gong, bowed bowls, electric guitar, bowed materials amplified & acoustic, mouthpiece and effects, modified zither. So yeah, there is still a patchwork of drones at the heart of Elvehjem, but there is… Read more »

Warren Byrom - Dreaming the Sun ()

LP Drowned Lands Series No.06 $23 Newest entry in the Jason Meagher’s great Drowned Land series is the long playing vinyl debut by Lexington, KY’s Warren Byrom. Recorded back before the Plague, the idea for Dreaming the Sun emerged when Jason caught a show by Warren and Philly-based pianist Hans Chew, who’d already been involved in lots of bands and recordings with Meagher. The sweet depth of Warren’s songs and guitar playing resonated with Jason, and Warren soon found himself in Black Dirt Studios with Nashville bassist Steve Poulton (whose work stretches back to Louisville’s legendary Paul K & the Weathermen) and drummer Ryan Jewell (who has played with half the musicians you can name). Other lovely bits were added… Read more »

ZOMES - Love’s Lesson ()

LP a co-release between Feedingtube Records and Near Unison.  OUT OF PRINT Fifth vinyl album (there have been four cassettes as well) by this Baltimore-based duo with international roots. Zomes began as a solo project by Asa Osbourne (ex-Lungfish, The Pupils), and recorded mostly solo drone-based instrumentals for several years. While performing at a festival in Stockholm, Asa met vocalist Hanna Olivegren, who shared his musical conceptions. Zomes’s first record as a duo was 2013’s Time Was (Thrill Jockey), and they have remained a two-piece ever since. The music on Love’s Lesson is largely built around Asa’s simple keyboard washes and drum box, atop which Hanna’s vocals stroll like Little Red Riding Hood walking through the Black Forest. The overall effect… Read more »

Food People - Many Glorious Petals ( / )

LP Edition of 360.  $23 After a handful of whacked-out cassettes & CDRs, for labels as discerning as Chocolate Monk and Beartown, this Nottingham trio has final made their debut LP, and it is a beautiful, swirling cone of sounds. Unlike some of their more savage kith, Food People‘s basic template is based less on explosive dynamics than it is on twisted invention. Their music is rarely overtly aggressive or ornery. Its power is drawn from quietly disorienting musical details that are assembled and fiddled-with at a patient pace. Sometimes the sounds they use are taped, at others they come from various strings (both plucked and bowed), maybe some simple reeds and possibly even a key or percussion or two…. Read more »

Bong Wish - Hazy Road ()

LP Edition of 400.  $23 Hazy Road is the debut album from Bong Wish, the solo project of Palestinian-American artist Mariam Saleh. Former bassist for beloved garage rock band Fat Creeps, Saleh got her start in the Boston music scene of the early 2010s. While living above a music venue, where she was also employed, she was exposed to a myriad of jazz, psych, and experimental music. In turn, Bong Wish incorporates both the high-energy and distortion of garage alongside kaleidoscopic soundscapes, and folds them into its folk rock sensibility.  Hazy Road is a coming-of-age album, documenting Saleh’s self-exploration, as fueled by her interest in psychedelia, spirituality and the desire to know oneself. “Love is in season, love is in… Read more »

Living Window - Astralturfing ()

LP Edition of 250. $22 Fantastic debut LP by this severely talented instrumental duo, currently based around Hampshire College unless I am much mistaken.  Living Window is comprised of drummer Cameron Mitchell and guitarist Mila Dorji, who have create an album of pile-driving avant garde hunch reminiscent of pre-Mahavishnu McLaughlin’s slow-hand recordings with Tony Williams or Billy Cox.  Mitchell drumming mixes rock and jazz attacks in equal measure, either drawing out rhythms or pounding them straight into pumice. And Dorji collects his amped notes into a huge mass before he releases them, displaying far more taste and patience than most of his contemporaries.  This kind of jazz/rock guitar/drum dueling can be traced back (more or less) to Doug Snyder &… Read more »

Liz Durette - Primordial Soup ()

LP Edition of 500. Bandcamp. $23 Another splendid album of avant hi-jinx and shreddery from keyboard whiz, Liz Durette. Primordial Soup is her fourth album (first was a cassette), and the second for Feeding Tube. It is the follow-up to 2020’s most excellent Delight (FTR 504) and heads into somewhat different stylistic turf, whilst maintaining Durette’s high levels of keyboard invention. If Delight was created while Liz was thinking about Romantic-era waltzes, then Primordial Soup owes some of its strategic approach to the delicate webs of ornamentation generated by French Baroque composers, as well as certain Eastern scales Liz was pondering. The pieces are all melodic as hell, but Liz describes them as having a “simpler tonal structure” than her… Read more »

Jordan Perry - What Do You See Everyday? ()

LP Edition of 300 Co-Release with 20/20 Records Another fantastic slab by Virginia-based guitarist Jordan Perry, whose style fuses disparate threads from the American Primitive and avant garde songbooks into a unique alloy.  For this album Primitivism has largely been eclipsed by avant urges. Still, there is one track, “Days Have Gone By Volume” where Jordan is joined by guitarist Ned Oldham for a piece evoking Fahey in more than its title. But that is the exception. Most of What Do You See Every Day? is filled with abstractions for acoustic guitar. His work has a genteel aura and pacing in which free melodies are played inside the context of graspable rhythmic structures. This simultaneously highlights their weirdness, and dials… Read more »

A Handful Of Dust - The Drum Is The Shaman’s Horse ()

LP edition of 330. Co-Release with Carbon Records. Out of Print  With the death in 2020 of long-standing occasional third member Peter Stapleton (percussion/electronics), A Handful of Dust has regrouped as the core duo of Alastair Galbraith (violin, guitar, cello, piano, drums) and Bruce Russell (guitar, electronics). This new set of live-to-four-track recordings from January 2022 is the first album to be wholly recorded ‘in the studio’ since 1995’s Towards a Soundtrack to the ‘Anabase’ of St-John Perse. Committed to tape at the Rugby Hotel in Dunedin, the four-track recordings were played back in the room where they were made and recorded again, this time to Android telephone, to make a digital mono master which you hear on this record…. Read more »

Up-tight - Sweet Sister ()

LP Co-Release with Cardinal Fuzz (UK) OUT OF STOCK Finally out – Sweet Sister – this mighty masterpiece of dark and wild psychedelia from the Japanese three-piece legends! Fuzz and reverb drenched jamming sounds from the basements of Hamamatsu evoking the always welcomed ghosts of Amon Düül and Les Rallizes Denudes. “Tokyo psych monsters Up-Tight come out of the classically wasted/drug-damaged school of excessive fuzz and reverb, giving the nod to the endless jam style of Les Rallizes Denudes while spiking their sound with dark downer ballads that owe as much to The Jacks as they do to The Velvet Underground. If you can picture Spacemen 3 circa “The Perfect Prescription” produced by Ghost circa “Temple Stone” then you’re close… Read more »