★Drag City
The Red Krayola
The triumphant return of the Red Krayola to record shops. Featuring members of Gastr del Sol, Slovenly, Tortoise. "Now working with such younger musicians as John McEntire (Tortoise), Jim O'Rourke, and David Grubbs, Mayo Thompson comfortably steers the Red Krayola into the mishmash of '90s post-punkdom here. For Thompson, it's not so much a return to the scene (he had always kept recording, after all) as a continuation of his themes of musical eclecticism. It's heavy on the angular guitar lines …
Coconut Hotel
These legendary recordings were shelved in ’67 for being too freaked-out! Today, they are sweet freak-outs to our ears. As strange as the Red Krayola's debut album was, their proposed follow-up, Coconut Hotel, was far stranger. This all-instrumental recording was more appropriately classified as twentieth-century avant-garde music than rock, and was rejected by International Artists for release in 1967, finally seeing the light of day on Drag City in 1995. All power to the Krayola for doing thin…
Singles
The very notion of the Red Krayola putting out "singles" is a little surreal, since singles are by most definitions the most commercial face of the record industry. After all, if anything was consistent about the Red Krayola throughout their career, it was their uncompromising underground uncommerciality. Yet the band actually put out a good number of singles in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and 21 tracks from those releases -- some of them quite rare, and some them actually previously unissued -…
Red Gold (Ep)
Less an Introduction, more a get-together with old friends. This gold is soaked red with the blood of the Krayola...and maybe a few others. The Red Gold EP, which is really more of a mini-album than an extended-play single per se, is the second Red Krayola release this year — an accomplishment that is no mean feat in and of itself.Throughout the band's 40-year history and ever-changing lineup, the only constant is longstanding singer/songwriter Mayo Thompson, whose gruff, southern-fried vocal de…
Fingerpointing
Oh, the difference an "o" makes. While Fingerpainting spoke of creation, Fingerpointing jabs you in the eye. These are Jim O'Rourke's alternate mixes, made from the same "paint" as the original release, but the colors are a different shade. 2008 release. "Free
form freak out is dead! Long live free form freak out! Sounds are
building blocks, say The Red Krayola, again and, now, again. '60s The
Red Krayola began recording because posterity asked for it. Today, they
proffer their latest sensat…
Five American Portraits
"I had been a fan of Mayo Thompson's prolific output for years, and had the opportunity to assist Mayo & Drag City on a previous project which I'm not at liberty to discuss due to a non-disclosure agreement. What I can say about it is that it involved time travel, another legendary avant-guardian and an agent of "the company" assisting my efforts. Mixing Five American Portraits at my studio Top Cat International was a joy and a breeze. DC mogul Rian Murphy was in the house simultaneously crackin…
Baby and Child Care
1984 unlreleaed befor album! When he wasn't busy with his many musical projects in the '70s and '80s, guitarist and songwriter Mayo Thompson was part of the celebrated British conceptual art collective Art & Language. Given Thompson's creative restlessness, it's not surprising that his partners in Art & Language became part of his musical efforts, most notably his shape-shifting group the Red Krayola, and they've teamed up for several albums since 1976's Corrected Slogans. Arriving in 2016, Baby…
Poke It With a Stick
“You knew you were in the presence of something powerful whenever they played. Their sound was open and catatonic. Cathartic. You recognized it right away." — Britt Walford (Slint drummer), remembering Louisville art-punks Your Food back when played out, in 1982–83. LP back in print for the first time in 35 years! Plus, first time in digital waves.
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.
Live in Kyoto 1978
An evening in a Kyoto coffee house from decades past that was living forever anyway, now captured as "vinyl". Formats of our contemporary time that have a long way to go before they outlast the music beneath John Renbourn's fingers.
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."