★Drag City
Red Hash
First reissue of this underground folk-psych classic, originally released in 1973 as a self-released LP. Red Hash features eleven haunting tracks of folk-pop played on acoustic and electric guitar and arranged with percussion, cello, flute, piano, organ, bass and mandolin. This plus Gary's transcendent vocals bring to mind the perfectly-damaged vibes found in David Crosby's masterpiece of peace, love and paranoia, If I Could Only Remember My Name and the recently re-discovered and acclaimed Para…
Sound Mind Sound Body (30th Anniversary Edition)
**30th Anniversary Edition. Remastered reissue, first on vinyl** Released in 1994 ‘Sound Mind Sound Body’ decrees the massive impact of discreet gestures; slow-moving tones and spacious orchestral resonances, drifting and droning with glacial majesty, hardly recognizable as guitar much of the time In 1987, Rafael Toral began making his own compositions and solo recordings. 30 years later, these recordings sound remarkably prescient and perfectly timeless - almost fresher today than when they wer…
Wave Field
**A prescient vision of the next phases of listening space! Remastered reissue, first on vinyl** Released in 1995 ‘Wave Field’ was a departure from the first album into new composition methods involving the dirty textures of rock guitar, sounding in the open ears of many listeners (like Jim O’Rourke, who issued the disc in the US on dexter’s cigar) as a synthesis of disparate elements - a nexus where Alvin Lucier, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine and Brian Eno blend together. Here, the clangorou…
A Child In The Sun: Radio Sessions 1969-1970
Armed only with a tiple (sort of a South American mandolin) and his lilting neigh of a voice (and bearing superficial resemblances to labelmates Pearls Before Swine and heady UK acoustic folkers Incredible String Band), Askew spun tales of doomed sisters, crashing universes, budding gay love and a serious fondness for roses on his rare, precious and beautiful album.After this lone release, Ed Askew seemingly vanished in the romantic mists of time … until a second, previously unreleased album sur…
Nodal excitation
"By the late '80s most of the burgeoning minimal underground had been forgotten, especially one amazing character, Arnold Dreyblatt. Dreyblatt only had one record, Nodal Excitation (on the mostly post-AACM jazz label India Navigation), before he packed and moved to Berlin, where he concentrated on his other activities, making only two more records over the next 10 years. But for those who caught the action, Arnold was the man. He was more rock that any of the others combined, and he was also the…
One Nation Underground
Another time, indeed! It's been fifty years since Pearls Before Swine first appeared. A genteel, oft-hushed missive from a far corner of the psychedelic hive mind, One Nation Underground was released on an Independent outlier of a record label, removed from the mainstream and still its spirit came to be widely appreciated by a generation and more. Today, this music has been reissued by labels around the world dozens of times. Tragic, then, that it hasn't been heard properly in decades! The stere…
Live on the Boffomundo Show
By October 1979, Aaron Weiner and Ron Curtiss had produced a handful of Boffomundo Shows at Los Angeles' first public access television studio at Theta Cable in Santa Monica. Joined by eventual partner Tony Harrington of All Ears Records, The All Ears Boffomundo Show was born!
Tony Harrington introduced legendary synthesizer master, Fumio Miyashita, founder of The Far East Family Band (space-rockers considered to be Japan's first prog band!), to the show and the rest is history. Fumio brought mu…
Burning The Threshold
A salve for folk souls and whoever needs it; Ben Chasny makes acoustic folk-pop great again. “In preparing for the first album of non-Hexadic Six Organs of Admittance music since 2012’s Ascent, Ben Chasny had a think about what he’d be saying in his own tongue for the first time in a half-decade. As ever, a head-full of ideas were driving him to think and speak music as a spirituality superimposed onto a reality, with the ghosts of both whispering at each other. In the end, what sits in our list…
1986-1991
"The Venom P. Stinger retrospective is on. One of the roughest groups of the '80s is back in print on vinyl and for the first time ever on CD, and still nice and hard and rough and wild on either format. File under: punk rock/noise rock/free-of-constraints rock. If you think of Venom P. Stinger simply as the proving ground for 2/3rds of the Dirty Three first, then you're seriously missing it, and fuck you. It was the mid-'80s and everything was going fine. The music underground was its own world…
Meet My Friend Venom
"The Venom P. Stinger retrospective is on. One of the roughest groups of the '80s is back in print on vinyl and for the first time ever on CD, and still nice and hard and rough and wild on either format. File under: punk rock/noise rock/free-of-constraints rock. If you think of Venom P. Stinger simply as the proving ground for 2/3rds of the Dirty Three first, then you're seriously missing it, and fuck you."
Waiting Room
Four song EP from Venom P. Originally released in 1991 by Au Go Go. A mini-dose from the What's Yours is Mine era, restored to it's full fury on 12" vinyl for the first time.
White Glove Test - Louiseville Punk Flyers 1978-1994
Clipped, collaged, and photocopied, meticulously hand-painted and lettered, or designed on a glowing computer screen in the early days of desktop publishing, these flyers were outsider broadcasts stuck to phone poles and storefronts, a makeshift gallery installed with staple guns and wheat paste. As a lavishly detailed document of Louisville’s vibrant and diverse music scene, this book offers an insider’s view of one seminal community’s rise from bold beginnings to eminent, international status.…
Mad Music
Something happened in Boston in the late 70s that nobody can explain. No, we're not talking about The Soiling of Old Glory. It's this Mad Music record, truly beautiful mutant strain of hi-fi/ambient/post-psych minimalism packaged exquisitely and randomly by parties unknown but well endowed with ideas for freaky juxapositions. Over 30 years later, it's still mysterious - but since you missed your first chance, here's your shot at one of the music world's rare records. Get even - get Mad Music!
"L…
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…
Divers
The dreamer dreams again with her 4th album of otherworldly microcosms, 'Divers', recorded by Steve Albini and featuring contributions by Nico Muhly and The City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, arriving five years since her last opus for Drag City. Still possessed by a voice that teeters between sublime and ridiculous (I honestly laughed out loud at the first song), Joanna Newsom remains a precious spirit within the indie folk paradigm, blessed with an air of stately patience and poised, imma…
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…
Andy and His Grandmother
Andy Kaufman changed the worlds of comedy and performance in the 1970s, showing fans and friends alike a determination to follow put-ons into territory no one had ever even considered 'comic' before. His fervor was so intense that when he passed away suddenly in 1984, it seemed as if the ultimate disappearing act had been staged; one that some people believe is still ongoing, with the reveal soon to come. This makes him the quintessential entertainer of our generation, a man ahead of his …
Recurring Dreams
Reissue of this 1981 album. Dating back to '81 and the apex of the Brian Eno / Berlin schools' influence over a myriad of American followers, Young created eight EMS/Rhodes pieces solo, subtly weaving in variable speed Revox manipulation of traditional Rock instrumentation with the lightest of touches. "Matthew Young's genre-bending, acclaimed 1986 release Traveler's Advisory reappeared as a reissue on Drag City/Yoga in 2010 and quickly sold out. We now return to Young's first effort, Recurr…
Shade Themes From Kairos
"Shade Themes from Kairos is a new iteration of the dream for all the guitar freaks out there, bringing together a couple of singular players together, just to see what happens. In this case, the players were old friends and collaborators Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O'Malley, playing in a space engineered and co-populated by Randall Dunn. From the top, Shade Themes from Kairos is resonant as a collective inquest in sound, with all the players deeply immersed within the panorama they are creating. …
Savage Sons Of Ya Ho Wa
"Now that the story of The Source Family is out there, as the subject of an acclaimed book and documentary film (as well as an ongoing series of rare, never-before-released recordings), it's time to turn the light back on the records that made this whole thing a story in the first place. In the 1990s, it was a revelation to discover that there was a series of records made by a hippie cult led by a big Santa Claus-looking guy named Father Yod. It was of further interest that these records weren…