Back in stock
On Patrol
On Patrol, originally released in 2010, is a double album in two parts, and the fourth full length album from Sun Araw. An album for heavy-steamin' late nights in the city, inter-dimensional back alleys, ghost cabs; it creeps and tunes in on a much darker, sparser, and more classically minded channel than its predecessors: dark and deep steam-vent ruminations on Phil Cohran, lenticular objects, and fried Hot 92.3 R&B slow-jams. A cold bug makes a real 'live wire.
99 explosions
"Orton Socket is mainly comprised of main-man and mouthpiece Rob Mazurek, known for blowing horns (as well as eardrums and minds etcetera) on a variety of efforts by Stereolab, Isotope 217, his own Chicago Underground Duo, and some other folks you probably have’nt heard of. Plus Rob's done a series of records under his own name. See, he's been a spotlight kid for years now. But for 99 Explosions, Rob has reemerged incognito, armed with synthesizer and powerbook, wearing the shimmering cloak of O…
In the Merry Month of May
Huge Tip! In the Merry Month of May is the final studio recording of the late, great Tony Conrad, and the first duo release with Jennifer Walshe, one of Conrad’s most important collaborators in the final decade of his life. Befitting these two absurdly gifted hell-raisers, this is a wild, improvisatory flaying of song, with Walshe’s clarion voice at the heart of the enterprise. The sheer sonic force of opener “In the Merry Month of May” recalls the ecstatic charge of Conrad’s Slapping Pythagoras…
Lacrau
The first duo performance between David Grubbs and Manuel Mota, the mysterious Portguese guitar legend; a real-time, documentary feel in which athematic, non-repeating musical gestures are rendered with an extreme sensitivity to microscopic soundworlds brought about by fingertips, strings, and tube amplifiers."Smoky seance of barely there strums and possible psychokinesis, ideal for fans of Loren Connors..." Boomkat
Dust & Mirrors
Dust & Mirrors’ is the second full-length album by the trio of Andrea Belfi (drums, percussion, electronics), David Grubbs (electric guitar, piano, voice), and Stefano Pilia (electric guitar). It follows 2010’s ‘Onrushing Cloud’ LP and finds the trio confidently taking stabs in a number of opposed directions. It dramatically widens the terrain in which the group operates. Between albums, the three musicians worked together on David Grubbs’s 2013 album ‘The Plain Where The Palace Stood’, and took…
Borough of Broken Umbrellas
David's debut on vinyl as a solo guitar improviser. Unhurried probing through spare themes for electric guitar and nylon-string acoustic. "Strange to say, but Borough of Broken Umbrellas is David Grubbs's first record of solo guitar improvisations, a profoundly unhurried probing (sometimes worrying, like a tongue and a tooth) of a handful of gorgeously spare themes. It divides its sides between two long (c. 12') tracks for electric guitar and nylon-string guitar. Comparisons are unnecessary…
Frolic Architecture
*Dense drones embedded with stuttering, spitted fragments of poetry. very abstract and oblique but engaging.* "The third collaboration from poet Howe and musician Grubbs. A soundworld that germinates wildly from this most multiple and heterogenous of Howe's poems. Real-performance of the fragment-strewn text is subject to Grubbs' further deformations, scattering and layerings."Frolic Architecture is the third collaboration from poet Susan Howe and musician David Grubbs. It follows Souls of the …
Adult guitar
Adult guitar is a startling anthology of twenty unreleased tracks from Noël Akchoté's first twenty-one years of recording. Adult guitar (it is twenty-one years, after all) is the first record to attempt to represent the breadth of Noël's music. The project began when Noël dumped ten hours of wonderfully heterogeneous archival recordings in the hands of David Grubbs, who served as project editor and created a number of pieces from the raw material of live recordings. The resulting collection incl…
Impro-micro-acoustique
Impro-Micro-Acoustique is a meeting across generations and genre. Composer Luc Ferrari, one of the progenitors of musique concrete and a pioneer of electroacoustic music, has previously written scores for improvising musicians. (One of these, 'Tautologos 3' -- in an explosive 1970 performance by Konstantin Simonovitch's ensemble -- appears on an earlier Blue Chopsticks release.) But prior to Impro-Micro-Acoustique, Ferrari himself had never played the role of an improviser. Several years ago, Fe…
Windows: The Music Of Steve Lacy
What a pleasant surprise! The Swedish multi-reed maestro, he of the coruscatingly wild fluteophone attacks, turns to the relatively calm and linear world of Steve Lacy and finds a very happy medium in this solo release. While he treats Lacy's deadpan and deceptively simple melodies with clear respect, he uses them as jumping off points for his own idiosyncratic deconstructions. On "Deadline," he navigates into a territory of ultra-soft percussive clicks and taps, creating a fascinating spatial f…
Isle Peaks
In the wake of the acclaimed Inland See, the on-growing analog ecosystem being animated for ten albums now by Bitchin Bajas boasts new high energy views. “Isle Peaks” speaks of directions in beats of time, weather and the heart to wherever coast they found themselves when they got it all laid out. Sourced from Inland See sessions, these cuts were subjected to further edits and tweaks, with electroacoustic textures of sampled kalimba, field recordings, autoharp and EWI to activate and transport d…
Jinxed By Being
What might appear to be the most unlikely collaboration of 2024 proves also to be one of the most invigorating listens of the year! Shackleton & Six Organs of Admittance are in full aural/metaphysical alignment in their mutual effort to become Jinxed by Being. On first listen, it becomes immediately clear that this fusion of Shackleton's bass-heavy cosmic dread and Six Organs' ritual folksong makes total sense. Longtime listeners know that both Shackleton and Six Organs of Admittance have been u…
Tashi Dorji
Tip! Early acoustic guitar improv performances from the Bhutanese expat, who’d come to Asheville, NC to study in 2000 and discovered worlds of anarcho-punk and avant garde such as he’d only dreamed. Having made recordings of his newly-located improvisational conception, he intuited a desire to go deeper in his explorations of the recorded sound of the guitar, melding and colliding traditional music with his feeling for the range of textures within.
Oneiric Formulary
Master of myriad styles, Sir Rick Bishop takes in baroque, flamenco, surf, and harder to place fusions of phantasmagoric sound design, Gaelic folk and Indian Raga, and more lysergic expression in this bounty of a new album.
Five years after Tangier Sessions, Sir Richard Bishop, we presume, is back from his travels around the world. With Oneiric Formulary, he’s dug deeper into his bag of extra-musical gestures from the eternal and unknowable, along with a few sounds we might recognize, all transm…
Hexadic III
New Hexadic music from outside our native understanding of ti me and space! Features underground masters of sound Moon Duo, Richard Youngs, Meg Baird & Charlie Saufley, Tashi Dorji, Jenks Miller, Phil Legard, and Stephen O'Malley, Tim Wyskida & Marc Urselli.
reaching for indigo
A moment that fell down in the life of Haley Fohr on January 22, 2016 — now in album form! Redefining and realizing the goals that were set to allow Haley become Circuit des Yeux and Circuit des Yeux to become Haley.
Hexadic II
Several years ago, after tiring of the predictable patterns he sensed himself settling into as a guitar player, Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance decided to design a theoretical framework that would force his hands into different positions. Chasny distributed a deck of poker cards in a circular array of sets of six, corresponding to the notes of the guitar. The relative positions of the cards gave Chasny a "tonal field" in which to operate, as well as a set of notes from which to pick, some…
Creation
Husband and wife team Johnima and Kalassu Wintergate are Lightstorm: globetrotting musical collaborators retransmitting messages of love from their teacher and Avatar Sathya Sai Baba: authentic 1970’s hippies on a spiritual space-journey. Most of the material gathered here was originally released on a small scale, so it is satisfying to see these oddities compiled and made available by Drag City. Since 1973, the Lightstorm discography has been issued under a variety of aliases (Creation E…
Tangier Sessions
"The tone of the guitar and Sir Richard's gentle, loving touch with it hold forth from the first moment of Tangier Sessions, sitting clear and true in the home-recorded night air above the city. The album sequence is the precise order of the songs as they were conceived and recorded. Rick's all over the neck in the early going while sorting through the dynamics of the instrument -- in fact, guitarophiles, the first couple of songs feature Sir Richard Bishop playing without a plectrum for the fir…
Ark Procession / Jericho
Al Cisneros is no stranger to the deep meditations of a minimalist, sub-sonic song. We've all been totally faced by the ritual low-end thunder his band, OM, bestow as gospel both live and on record on the regular, a sound source which can hardly be described as minimal yet never needs more than a smattering of accompaniment beyond its usual, steady drumming. Perhaps a bit of guitar here, some keys there, or maybe just some extra tambo to provide color, but first and foremost, you get full…