We are honored to present the final two LPs from the late Birmingham, AL-based queer poet and artist Johnny Coley, who passed away in 2025 at the age of 76. Tender, lucid, and slippery poems unspool in Johnny’s signature drawl, charting oblique journeys through the sidereal and mundane. He composes painterly landscapes of his beloved Alabama and imagines waking up in the crowded streets of London. This is Southern Surreal story-telling where each new word opens a door to the familiar unexpected. Both albums feature intimate collaborations with his small cohort of Birmingham-affiliated composers and improvisers that have helped usher Johnny's work to wider audiences with past releases on Sweet Wreath, Mississippi Records, and Astral Editions. On Where the Smoke Goes, Turner Williams Jr. assembles dilating tapestries of fractured Americana with assists from Old Saw’s Henry Birdsey while on As I Slip Into the Sky, Joel Nelson boldly illuminates Johnny’s final improvisations with shimmering analog electronics. All told, these two LPs work in tandem, highlighting the unique terrain Johnny occupied, and capturing the magical twilight peak of a true poetic voice of our strange late American era.

Where the Smoke Goes captures the conscious and unconscious of Johnny Coley in duet between 2020-2024 AD. Alabama-born, Marseille-based artist Turner Williams Jr. wraps a selection of his dear friend Johnny’s penultimate compositions in arresting tone poems. The music buzzes and hums with distant trains, trembling strings, and lapping water, haloing our protagonist in a humid glow as he considers whether horses can live to 70 years old, cigarettes potent enough to knock you on your ass, and orchids facing the wrath of winter storms. This work began in the first Covid spring, as Johnny's advancing multiple sclerosis gave way to a permanent domestic confinement and a final period of prolific creativity. Johnny braved the toxic gales of social media to share his thriving poetry and visual art practice and to keep in touch with friends like Turner, who had recently moved abroad. For the first time, Johnny recorded himself, sending Turner fresh poems, day and night. Taking cues from late era Coil and the operas of Robert Ashley, Turner approached these recordings both as language and pure sound, arranging accompanying mosaics that emerge as much from Johnny’s unseen text as his mercurial drawl. Tracks draw from Turner’s solo practice as well as sessions including Henry Birdsey of Old Saw, members of the French underground (Manoir Molle, Loto Retina, Mona Assayag) and close Birmingham collaborators (Jasper Lee, Jimmy Griffin, Ladonna Smith). The voice is parsed and played as an instrument and each poem becomes a score.

There is Johnny’s poetry and Johnny’s voice. These are two independent yet interwoven instruments. For Turner, Johnny's vocabulary, cadence, and timbre carry all of the contradictions that he writes about. His work is a dialogue of rich contradictions. "He plays with Southern American vernacular speech in his poetry while embodying it with his speech, creating a zone of emotional frisson. He loved combining opposites. Rough yet soft was one of his favourite descriptors", Turner recalls, "That was Johnny.” Upon hearing the completed record, Johnny likened it to "a beautiful wood box, that when you open it there are fabrics shot through with silk threads and sharp fall-woods smells - supporting and decorating the poems that fall out of them.” This record captures something unconscious, atmospheric, and gives it unexpected materiality. Smoke that you can feel like grass under your feet. Stars that you can touch like a lover. Meeting for the final time in the summer or 2025, the time for words had passed so they just held hands and listened to the album opener "Stargazer” in silence as Johnny drifted off to sleep.