Loren Connors' second art book: 108 full-color pages of fragile flower paintings, drawings and haiku, gathered over a year of mailed envelopes, with a preface by Yuko Otomo. Hardbound, 8.5 x 11 inches, first edition of 150.
Late-90s guitar pieces by Loren Connors, most on vinyl for the first time: the unrealized 1996 double 7" Battle of Clontarf, The Five Points EP, the Star of Bethlehem suite and Gershwin's I Love You, Porgy. 180g LP, edition of 300.
"There are fewer great guitar trio records than you'd suspect. Guitar duo sessions are far more abundant, and these three players have all done their share of those. But the dynamics of a trio are more-fickle. And when creating collaborative non-hierarchical music, maintaining a balance between three distinct voices is not easy. It requires rapt attention, a fearless approach to entering the unknown, and very good ears to do it successfully.
Clearly, Connors, Vallera, and Sharp display mastery o…
Somewhere in the Wind is the third record that Loren Connors and I have made together. Of the three, it’s the first that consists exclusively of electric guitar duos and it’s the first that was recorded live. To me it feels very much like a live record; this music happened in crowded rooms in Brooklyn on two dates in 2025 and there’s an urgency to connect with others and a pleasure in doing so that can be heard on both of these tracks. On the first of our duo records (Arborvitae, 2003) I primari…
On Live at ISSUE Project Room, Loren Connors and Alessandra Novaga turn the guitar into a nearly weightless medium, tracing an improvised, slow‑burn dialogue of tremors, silences and ghost‑melodies that feels less like a concert than a séance for two.
Crucible by Loren Mazzacane Connors & Suzanne Langille is a profound exploration of the raw emotional landscapes that can be sculpted through minimalistic yet deeply evocative sounds. The album resides at the intersection of experimental blues and avant-garde, creating a sound that is both hauntingly intimate and expansively atmospheric.
Each track seems to dwell in a space where the boundaries of music blur into a meditative state, driven by Loren's sparse guitar work and Suzanne's ethereal voc…
Here is the second volume of protean solo improvisations recorded by Loren Connors in his artist's garret in New Haven, Connecticut. Like the first volume, it was committed to tape and pressed to vinyl in 1979. Never having seen a copy of this record, and having pressed it before we discovered a master cassette exists, this is as good a transfer as can be had for the nonce. Loren's chair creaks like rusty crow and the amount of random tapping and thumping during the original session just about d…
Evening Air is the result of Loren Connors and David Grubbs’s first trip to the recording studio in the two decades since their first duo album, Arborvitae (Häpna). Arborvitae stood out for its spellbinding, utterly unhurried meshing of electric guitar (Connors) and piano (Grubbs). With this long-awaited return, Connors and Grubbs take turns trading off on piano and guitar, with Grubbs at the keyboard for the two gently expansive pieces on the first side and Connors taking over the instrument fo…
*2023 stock* For me, this is the blues. Utterly wailing "solos" over a base of thick distorted guitars, Loren Connors' music conjures up scenes of lonely streets, dark nights, but also hopeful and joyful mornings. 9th Avenue is the first vinyl reissue of a CD Loren released on his Black Label in 1995, a view into his mid-90's heavier electric guitar era, back when he was going by his Loren Mazzacane Connors moniker.
9th Avenue fits right alongside releases from that same time period, such as Lon…
Recital is pleased to publish the first vinyl edition of Let the Darkness Fall, a forgotten corner from the vast discography of Suzanne Langille & Loren Connors. Joined here by David Daniell and Andrew Burnes (of the Atlanta-based group San Agustin), Darkness was recorded in the summer of 1998 on a Tascam Porta-5 in Loren and Suzanne’s Brooklyn living room, and issued the following year as a limited CD by Secretly Canadian.
The tender gloom of Let the Darkness Fall sounds like a broadcast of som…
*Limited edition of 200 hand-numbered copies. 100 color pages.* Night of Rain is the second art book by musician and artist Loren Connors, following last year's Wildweeds (Recital, 2021). The book is composed of two parts: 'Night of Rain,' which Loren describes as "seascapes, or expressions of the sea and shore. [They are] about the power of rain and the sea, lagoons, bays, tides." Taken from small pencil and black ink drawings enlarged again and again at a copy store. The pieces would often be …
Limited edition of 350 copies. Sold out at source To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Recital, we present Autumn Fair. A group LP comprised of 44 guest players (full list below), curated and edited together by Sean McCann. Autumn Fair aptly embodies the feeling of Recital as a record label; the infusion of abstract sound art and sentimental beauty – performed by both younger and older generations of artists. Oren Ambarchi - guitar, Ed Atkins - paper shredder, Jason Bannon - family, Derek Baron …
*2022 repress. Limited edition of 600 copies.* Over the 23 years since Loren Connors’ Airs was first published, it has drawn a thick circle of fans. Gently recorded to cassette tape in 1999, (with wonderfully subtle multi-tracking), Airs is comprised of a series of brief electronic guitar poems. Intimately composed with the patience and purposeful hesitation we have reverently come to expect from Connors. Lyrical melodies recur in different forms throughout the LP, as shifting figures in a dream…
*2022 stock.* Leone is the first meeting of electric guitarists Loren Connors and Oren Ambarchi. It’s somewhat surprising it’s taken this long as these two are connected by ongoing collaborators, like Jim O’Rourke and Keiji Haino. Connors, for more than 40 years, has continued to develop an iconic sound tethered to radical permutations of the blues. Ambarchi’s own multi-decade transfiguration of the guitar inhabits a rarefied realm of abstracted tones and dissonance pitched between improvisation…
A unique live performance at Issue Project Room gathered the former Sonic Youth member and artist Kim Gordon and the legendary minimal blues master and artist Loren Connors in 2014. In December 2014, the Issue Project Room venue in New York City offered the first-time duo with the legendary Brooklyn- based guitarist Loren Connors and the rock icon Kim Gordon. From this almost 1 1⁄2 hour set, Kim and Loren decided to archive their favourite movement on a physical record which is a 12” vinyl now …
* 9″ x 12″ perfect soft bound, 120 pages First edition of 150, hand-numbered * Wildweeds is the first art book by musician Loren Connors. Following a series of LPs on Recital showcasing Loren’s haunting guitar playing, I am pleased to present a proper collection of his Wildweed drawings. Connors’ visual art has occasionally been included as little prints and pamphlets inside his LPs and CDs; though, always explored in a shade, an appendage to his music. Combusted bulbs of purple and yellow fl…
Tom Carter and Loren Connors are a pairing so obvious, it’s a mystery how it took this long to happen. Each has traversed the American underground on their own unique path. Carter co-founded acid-folk improvisers Charalambides in 1991 and Connors has been redefining his singular vision of the blues since the late 1970s. On this debut non-titled LP, these guitar masters conjure a stunning, and at times labyrinthine, six-string tableau. Carter’s high-contrast spiral melodies sear through Connors’…
This is the first LP release on Loren Connors’ and David Grubbs’ Arborvitae, originally released on CD by the Swedish label Häpna in 2003. Loren Connors and David Grubbs first performed as a duo on May 30, 2003 at the Green-Wood Cemetery Chapel in Brooklyn, N.Y. Green-Wood Cemetery is one of Brooklyn’s landmarks—it’s the highest natural point in the borough, and an unexpected expanse of tranquility in the midst of the city. The stone interior of the chapel makes the quietest of sounds audible, a…
Edition of 500. "Here is the first volume of protean solo improvisations recorded by Loren Connors in his artist's garret in New Haven, Connecticut. It was committed to tape on February 20, 1979 and pressed to vinyl soon after. As with the two earlier LPs on Loren's Daggett label, singer/recorder-player Kath Bloom also appears on this record, although only on the second side. Those prior LPs were both issued in 1978, The first was Acoustic Guitar/Gifts a split LP with Loren solo on one side and …
On this Record Store Day exclusive release, entitled The Only Way To Go Is Straight Through, Thurston Moore and Loren Connors fearlessly dive into a hot, dark pool and enter a world of surging sound and faint lights. They can’t see each other. They can only hear each other’s searing notes in the heat. But it is enough to take them through.
The material on The Only Way To Go Is Straight Through was compiled from two live recordings. Side A was captured at The Stone in Manhattan, where Moore and C…
The extraordinary creative partnership of New Haven, CT duo Kath Bloom and Loren Connors has haunted psych-folk fans since the early 80s. Kath taught herself guitar during shifts as a janitor at a New Haven cemetery, while Loren’s free-form idiosyncratic style had been developing since the late 60s. Between 1981 and 1984, the duo recorded two live and four studio albums, mostly self-released in tiny quantities.Early on, their music mixed folk and blues traditionals with a handful of Kath’s vulne…
The extraordinary creative partnership of New Haven, CT duo Kath Bloom and Loren Connors has haunted psych-folk fans since the early 80s. Kath taught herself guitar during shifts as a janitor at a New Haven cemetery, while Loren’s free-form idiosyncratic style had been developing since the late 60s. Between 1981 and 1984, the duo recorded two live and four studio albums, mostly self-released in tiny quantities.Early on, their music mixed folk and blues traditionals with a handful of Kath’s vulne…
One of the world’s most singular guitarists, Loren Connors is among few living musicians whose prolific body of work can be said to be wholly justified in its plenitude. On more than 100 records across almost four decades, Connors has wrung distinct shades of ephemeral blues from his guitar, its sound ever-shifting while remaining unmistakably his own. From his early, splintered take on the Delta bottleneck style through his song-based albums with Suzanne Langille and on to the painterly abstrac…
The Departing of a Dream, Vol. VII is the debut collaboration between two giants of the New York avant-garde — guitarist Loren Connors and saxophonist/trumpeter Daniel Carter. It's a gorgeous, languorous soundscape distilled from the darkest reaches of blues and jazz. For nearly 17 years Connors has used the Departing series to continue his meditation on Miles Davis' epic "He Loved Him Madly" and expand his efforts to create disappearing music. The duo does just that, vanishing behind decaying …
**Art edition of 100 copies, hand-painted and -drawn by Loren Connors** Before the spectral, romantic electric guitar miniatures for which he is celebrated today, Loren Connors recorded a string of nine solo acoustic guitar improvisations under the name of Loren Mazzacane between 1979 and 1980. The records feature Loren's contorted impressions of Delta and country blues, persistently kneaded into sidelong guitar excursions entangled with wordless, mournful vocal utterances, hummed and moaned in …
**Edition of 400 copies, sold-out at source** Before the spectral, romantic electric guitar miniatures for which he is celebrated today, Loren Connors recorded a string of nine solo acoustic guitar improvisations under the name of Loren Mazzacane between 1979 and 1980. The records feature Loren's contorted impressions of Delta and country blues, persistently kneaded into sidelong guitar excursions entangled with wordless, mournful vocal utterances, hummed and moaned in imitation of the dogs that…
The fourth LP in Recital's Loren Connors editions/reissue series. Pretty As Ever is a beautiful collection of Loren's guitar ballads, dedicated to his wife Suzanne. It includes the "Pretty As Ever" and "Trinity" suites, from the out-of-print album Sails (2005), alongside the complete Little Match Girl (2000). This album falls in line with the other LPs Recital has published, Airs (2015), Lullaby (2016), Evangeline (2017)... as hopeful and careful as a heartbeat. This LP includes "Woman of Sorro…
A crucial piece of the Loren Connors jigsaw falls into place with this first ever vinyl reissue of Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell!, now presented on wax some 20 years after the original CD issue thru The Lotus Sound. Leading on from his classic Long Nights (on Table of the Elements), it takes that album’s blues-noise textures into even starker, scorched ground surely irresistible to anyone snagged by his other works, for their anomalous nature if nowt else.Revolving around 12 works in under 20 min…
Riveting compendium of stark, raw blues by an erstwhile sparring partner of Loren Connors, recently salvaged from an old shoebox of tapes, restored by Taylor Deupree and mastered by Carl Saff. "I would go as far as to say that the few recordings that exist of these Robert Crotty sessions are among the finest and most beautiful blues documents of all time." (Loren Connors). In the years 1978 to 1981, Robert Crotty would show up on Loren Connors’ doorstep in New Haven, Connecticut with his ti…
First-time available on vinyl (pressed as a limited CD in 1998), Evangeline finds Connors working in a narrative structure. This album trails the story of Evangeline, the heroine of an epic-poem written in 1847. Loren’s guitar tone follows the weary landscapes and mournful souls of the characters. Thematically Evangeline falls in line with the other romantic Loren Connors LPs Recital as published, Airs and Lullaby, though with a defining arc in direction. Parallel guitar preludes begin this…
Blues: The ‘Dark Paintings’ of Mark Rothko is one of Loren Connors’ most cherished and sought after albums. Originally released in a handmade edition of 200 or so copies on Connors’ own St. Joan imprint in January 1990 under the name Guitar Roberts -- Blues has been unavailable in any form until now. At time of its release, Connors was still an inscrutable guitarist whose matchless and alien rendering of the blues was just gaining recognition despite more than a dozen solo and collaborative rele…
Following the breathtaking Airs, another gem from Loren MazzaCane Connors "story of shadowed miniatures; flickering electronic guitar poems,” the 14-track album was originally burned to CD-R in an edition of 100, but is now being remastered from the original tapes, with Loren’s recent artwork included as a 6”x9” insert reaches vinyl on Sean McCann’s Recital imprint. Lullabies renders Connors at his most sublime, wistfully sanguine, swaddled in tape distortion and gentle reverbs with a barely the…
After ten years, guitarist Loren Connors returns to his much acclaimed and beloved The Departing of a Dream series. Initially based loosely as tribute to Miles Davis' masterwork "He Loved Him Madly," Connors delves further into the inspiration to explore melody as a slow-moving spectrum of shades projected against a fragile, often decaying ambience.Volume Five continues the theme, as Connors coaxes complex blues mutations and wide swathes of distant vibrating tones -- not unlike the expre…
Lost City project started as a series of photographs shot by visual artist and composer Aki Onda in New York starting right after 9.11 in 2001. A decisively introspective response to the major world event taking place, his pictures were devoid of direct references, but documented his immediate surroundings, focusing on how what happened resonated on a personal micro-level.Since 2005, Onda has been presenting this series as slide projections, which function as a visual score for improvisation, a…
**last copies** Re-release of a heartbreaking, beautifully enigmatic masterpiece by the venerable guitar virtuoso Loren Connors. "In 1994, after the Hell's Kitchen Park album and Mother & Son 7” ep had come out, a semi-sequel to the latter was released by Table of the Elements in the form of a 7-inch ep called The Five Points. The record told a short story of a New York City slum of that name, which counted the city's most mortalities in the year 1857, of which most were Irish children under six…
Wish I Didn’t Dream, the new album of duets by guitarist Loren Connors and vocalist Suzanne Langille, was cut in just a few hours of studio time. But the pieces started falling into place 15 years earlier on the 10th floor of a nondescript building in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. It was there, at the old location of the Brecht Forum, that Connors got to know writer and WFMU DJ Kurt Gottschalk, who was curating a concert series there. On occasion Tom Abbs (now President of Northern Sp…
23 minute piece of solo guitar wrangling by the avant blues elder statesman. Limited, hand-numbered edition of 350 housed in screen-printed wrap-around with insert in poly jacket** "Connors is an avant-garde legend, with more than 100 releases of his singular alien take on the blues. RIYL: Jack Rose, Michael Chapman, Jim O’Rourke, John Fahey. A Fire is a single-sided LP by master guitarist Loren Connors. Recorded live in Philadelphia in 2010, this 23 minute piece follows in the style and visual …