★Reading Group
the blacksmiths, the flowers
Reading Group is thrilled to announce a new album from the celebrated trio of Fred Moten (voice), Brandon López (double bass), and Gerald Cleaver (drums). Following the release of their 2022 self-titled debut album, also on Reading Group (RG23), the trio has been developing their improvisatory language in concerts across North America and the UK. While growing from their first album’s perpetually restrained simmer, their infamous live shows explore a propulsive, relentless, and massively energet…
X-Ray Hex Tet
*200 copies limited edition* Reading Group is proud to present the debut album of a new ensemble of some of the most adventurous artists in and around London’s contemporary music scene. X-Ray Hex Tet is the confluence of Seymour Wright (alto saxophone), Crystabel Riley (drums), Edward George (words and recordings), Pat Thomas (piano and electronics), Paul Abbott (real and imaginary drums), and Billy Steiger (celeste and violin). Wright and Abbott, elsewhere as XT, have developed a private langua…
Soul Musings
Reading Group is thrilled to present our second collaboration with the magisterial composer Carman Moore. Following the 2020 release of his gorgeous chamber soundtrack to the film "Personal Problems" (1980), "Soul Musings" is a double-CD representing Carman's innerly composerly life of the last several decades. Consisting mostly of sketched ideas, meditations, and improvisations on synthesizer or piano, this record is both an intimate portrait of the artist at home as well as spiritual gift. Dis…
Spatial Data Management (Original Score)
*100 copies limited edition* Reading Group, in collaboration with Braddock, PA-based imprint Huner Francis, is pleased to present "Spatial Data Management (Original Score)" by Ulla E. Straus and John Andrew Wilhite, a beautiful score to an equally beautiful film by Philadelphia-based artist Greyory Blake. The score to Spatial Data Management (2021) is a contemplative and referential ambient work. It provides the backdrop for the essay film’s exploration of how stolen value and the contemporary p…
Blue Monday
Reading Group is very happy to announce the release of Blue Monday, a new LP from Zara Joan Miller and Ute Kanngießer. The LP is the result of the first live collaboration between the poet/artist Miller and the cellist/improvisor Kanngießer, recorded at London’s Cafe Oto in January of 2023. Kanngießer’s searching, intensive cello lays an amorphous terrain beneath passing fragments of Miller’s poetry (from her 2022 book of the same name from Joan Publishing), billboards dotting the interior freew…
Contradictions (plays Lu Xun, Zizek, Baudrillard and Beckett)
Tip! Reading Group is thrilled to release Contradictions (plays 4 writers), the new LP by legendary musician and poet Yan Jun. Yan Jun has been a central figure in the (non-)music, noise, sound, and experimental performance scenes both in his native Beijing and in the global subterranean community for decades. He founded the Beijing-based experimental label Sub Jam in 2000 and has since collaborated with Lionel Marchetti, Axel Dörner, Toshimaru Nakamura, Torturing Nurse, and many more. On Contra…
The Hands of Grace
* Edition of 250 CDs, with liner note essays by Ishmael Reed and Fred Moten. * A great pleasure to play with my favorite writer; he has transformed his literary genius to the piano in one lifetime, Bravo!" -David Murray Reading Group is thrilled to announce The Hands of Grace, a new album of original music by the legendary novelist, essayist, poet, critic, and playwright Ishmael Reed (b. Tennessee, 1938). The Hands of Grace presents for the first time the original music that Reed composed for hi…
Blood Karaoke
James Krivchenia (b. Minnesota, 1988) is a many-armed sculptor of music. Known primarily for his roles in Big Thief (as drummer and producer), Mega Bog (as longtime engineer, co-producer and percussionist) and his various other groups and session work (ranging from the experimental improvisation of Causings to the likes of Taylor Swift) Krivchenia has been quietly building strange musical worlds in parallel with his own experimental records. Krivchenia’s solo works are tableaus of his conceptual…
s/t
Reading Group is thrilled to introduce the debut LP from a new improvising group of three singular artists: Fred Moten (voice), Brandon López (double bass), and Gerald Cleaver (drums). López and Cleaver have been improvising together as a duo for a number of years, over which they’ve developed a secret, unspoken language of organically growing repetitive figures in a wide range of sonic palettes. López and Cleaver have long been recognized as some of the most vital voices in contemporary experim…
Personal Problems OST
**250 copies** Reading Group is proud to present the first-ever issue of Carman Moore’s beautiful soundtrack to the “meta-soap opera” Personal Problems (1980). Starring Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor (writer, culinary anthropologist, and one-time member of Sun Ra’s Arkestra), Personal Problems was the result of a collaboration between Ishmael Reed, Bill Gunn, and Steve Cannon. Side A of this LP presents Moore’s original score as it was recorded in New York City in 1980. Side B contains improvisations …
Faculty Canon
** Edition of 75 with with insert. Translucent Voices Piled Into Strata--accordion Folded On Polyester Film ** Faculty Canon is artist Tim Simonds' first audio publication: a group reading of his book ╲╱╲╱╲╱╲╱╲╱╲╱╲╱╲, including reading exercises, rehearsals, and canons. ╲╱╲╱╲╱╲╱╲╱╲╱╲╱╲ is a book composed of text and images taken from hesitations, misspellings, auto-corrections, and concealed errors in a teacher's marginalia, comments, and endnotes. Printed on the occasion of the exhibition I sai…
Seashells
* Limited edition of 250. In process of stocking * Their first album in over six years, "Seashells" is the 10th full-length record by Blanche Blanche Blanche (Zach Phillips and Sarah Smith). As "Blue" Gene Tyranny once wrote to BBB, "I really, really have been enjoying your albums. To me they are a pure modern bop style, but don't let me characterize your writing in any way. They are just quite wonderful. The ever-evolving disjunctive bop stimulates in my mind thoughts of hearing Lambert Hendrix…
Theodor Adorno: Piano Works
* Limited edition of 250. In process of stocking * Cop Tears recorded selections from Theodor Adorno's piano works in an apartment in New York during the winter of 2018. Cop Tears is John Andrew Wilhite-Hannisdal (double bass), Derek Baron (flute), Cameron Kapoor (guitar), and John Welsh (guitar). This is Cop Tears second album, following their recording of John Cage's Thirteen Harmonies (2016), re-issued by Recital in 2018. Andrew flew in from Norway and stayed at the apartment in New York whe…
Wanda's Dream
Limited edition of 250. Includes digital download card. Reading Group is thrilled to present Wanda's Dream, the new work by Krakow-based sound artist and researcher Marcin Barski. Below is Barski's introduction to the record. The 1980s were special. It was then when microphones became a natural common part of the equipment of many households. Audio recordings were no longer unusual: everyone could make them. Handheld walkmans with a dictaphone option, analogue answering machines, tape players al…
Recollects
Limited edition of 250. Includes digital download card. Recollects, Derek Baron's second solo LP following Penultimate Press's Crooked Dances,
was recorded in September 2016 in the Boundary Waters between Superior
National Forest in northern Minnesota and Quetico Provincial Park in
southwest Ontario. Here, Derek brings together a repeatedly postponed
canoe trip and a bin of old cassette tapes from the 1990s. Family
histories are retold and misremembered, wildlife calls are heard and
miside…
Double B
Following up on his remarkable Triangular Trade, sound artist (and operator of the Every Contact Leaves a Trace imprint) Seth Cooke offers with Double B another richly investigated, purposeful work looking into the sonic artifacts of the unresolved dissonances in constellations of history, politics, and media. Through his no-input field recording technique, Cooke brings into consideration the materiality of the inscription devices, a sort of sonic ghost hunting that rewards investigative listeni…
Cross Country
David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was a writer and artist active in New York's Downtown scene in the 1970's and 80's. In the 1980's Wojnarowicz become one of the central figures in the AIDS struggle, as well as the target of homophobic censorship efforts by the American Family Association. Wojnarowicz kept written and cassette tape journals throughout his adult life. This three-disc vinyl release publishes for the first time three of Wojnarowicz's tape journals, documenting his thoughts, dreams, fea…