Releases

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 »

Melted Men - Jaw Guzzi ()

LP Edition of 500. $21 Jaw Guzzi is the ninth LP Melted Men have released since 1995. This is reportedly the year they formed, but as with all Melted Things, there is little hard information to back this up. Like an earlier experimental ”rock” band from Northern California (by way of Louisiana), Melted Men have embraced something akin to Nigel Senada’s Theory of Obscurity. Facts regarding the band’s details are smudgy at best, and that’s the way they like it. About all I could get out my contact for the group is that they are currently a six piece, with members based in France, Croatia, Holland and America. They seem to have initially been centered in or around Athens, Georgia…. Read more »

Ryan Power - World of Wonder ()

LP Edition of 220.  $22 From the sui generis pop songwriting mind of Ryan Power comes World of Wonder, his first album since 2020’s Mind the Neighbors. Following a string of influential releases on the Vermont label NNA tapes, World of Wonder is Power’s second release on Massachusetts imprint Feeding Tube Records. While its predecessor presented Power in a largely stripped down, acoustic setting with lush horn and string arrangements, World of Wonder has Power return to his characteristic hyper-produced, high-fidelity home studio to craft a set of ten songs which harmonically undulate, consistently surprise, and which all further solidifies him as one of the most engaging songsmiths of our time. Power, 48, describes the lyrical content of this album… Read more »

Sham - Machine Simple ()

LP Co-Release with 20/20 Records  $21 / NEW COMMUTE  ALBUM OF THE YEAR 2023 Machine Simple is an album of accumulated songs and sounds over the course of almost 2 years. The first song written was “As The Heat Rises” in summer 2021 at the base of Mount Rainier on the hottest day on record, 114 degrees Fahrenheit, standing in snow watching the river full of silt flow filled with its melt. The songs periodically appeared, along with others that aren’t on this record, throughout the next year and a half or so. The first attempt to record this album was in my old house on Heron Avenue in West Asheville, and bled into my friend Zack’s space down the… Read more »

Sky Furrows - Reflect and Oppose ()

LP Co-Release with Cardinal Fuzz (UK) OUT OF STOCK Albany, New York’s Sky Furrows—guitarist Mike Grifin, bassist Eric Hardiman, drummer Phil Donnelly and poet/vocalist Karen Schoemer—release their second album, Relect and Oppose (Cardinal Fuzz/Feeding Tube) on November 24, 2023. Recorded in 2022 with Justin Pizzoferrato at Sonelab Studios and Pete Donnelly at Katonah Sound, the album’s eight songs crush and crunch, agitate and sprawl. All songs were written by Schoemer/Grifin and arranged by Sky Furrows, except for “Koba Grozny,” with music by Grifin and words adapted by Schoemer from Martin Amis’s 2002 book Koba the Dread. Sky Furrows formed in 2016 and released their self-titled debut album in 2020 on Tape Drift/Skell/Philthy Rex Records, but band members had been crossing… Read more »

Drazek Fuscaldo Featuring Hamid Drake / Tatsu Aoki / Thymme Jones and Joshua Abrams - June 22 ()

LP Edition of 500 Co-Release with Astral Spirits. $22 Like last year’s brilliant Wings Dipped in Fire (FTRCS398) this new album was recorded by Taylor Hales at Chicago’s Electrical Audio. But this time, the duo (once known at Mako Sica) is joined not just by keyboard/trumpet master Thymme Jones, but also percussionist Hamid Drake, bassist Tatsu Aoki (on shamisen) and bassist Joshua Abrams. A total post-form all-star line-up, with more combined chops than a breakfast table crammed with lumberjacks.  The mood on june 22 is weird and simmering. Blasts of heat alternate with spaced-out jam abstractions with Brent Fuscaldo’s vocals and Przemyslaw Krys Drazek’s guitar and trumpet dodging in and out of available crevices. As with all of this combo’s… Read more »

Isasa - Canciones de amor ()

LP Co-Release with Repetidor $20 With five albums released, several tours around Spain, Europe, Uruguay and the United States in which he has paired among others with Geoff Farina (Karate) or Glenn Jones and even performed at the legendary John Fahey tribute festival in Takoma Park, Maryland (The Thousand Incarnations of the Rose)…. the passing of time has consolidated Isasa’s musical career to the point of winning the praise of such exquisite critics as Byron Coley or Wire magazine, the blessing of masters of the new guitar such as Max Ochs or Richard Osborn, as well as the unanimous admiration and recognition of his contemporaries. We are talking about artists of the stature of Marisa Anderson, Micah Blue Smaldone, Steve… Read more »

Jeffrey Alexander - Reyes ()

LP Edition of 500. (150 available). Co-Release with Ramble Records $21 Vinylization of the splendid 2021 cassette, issued by Garden Portal. The music was recorded partially out west in San Francisco and Point Reyes (hence the title), as well as in Alexander’s current locale of Philadelphia.  An instrumental addition to Alexander’s canon, the music was mostly generated on guitar, but other sonic elements include — bass, pebbles, fake mellotron, waves, moog, shells, fife, magnetic tape, and talking book phonograph. The results are a sweet, rural stroll through the kind of mind gardens the various off-shoots of the Youngbloods explored back in the Raccoon Records era, when they were based in Point Reyes as well.  Reyes’s other main  counter-culture avatar was… Read more »