Johnny Coley
As I Slip into the Sky
As I Slip Into the Sky reflects a particularly small sliver of time compared to Where the Smoke Goes, with recordings taking place in early 2025, while Johnny Coley was bed-bound in an assisted living facility with multiple sclerosis. Alabama born, Portland based artist Joel Nelson helms the nearly entirely electronic backdrop, posing a new canvas for Johnny, with Buchla music easel bubbling up between Johnny’s lines. This album captures Johnny in a remarkably tender and emotive form. Love and a…
Where the Smoke Goes
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.…
Mister Sweet Whisper
Big Tip! “You’re living in a dream, Coley…” Surreal, layered, Lynchian landscapes by Birmingham, Alabama poet, Johnny Coley. On his Mississippi Records debut, Coley takes a completely improvised and semi-hallucinatory journey down decrepit southern trucking routes, gaslit Victorian alleys, past “a small frame house / transparent with fire,” and by women arguing on the cobblestones outside a dark club in Rome (“you could only see their lips”). It’s a world of flesh vehicles, supernatural waiters,…
Landscape Man
*Limited edition of 200 copies.* Robert Desnos dreamed: I saw Davey Williams and Johnny Shines playing dice with Fred Lane; Isaiah Owens and Andrei Tarkovsky witnessing to a UAB anthropology graduate student; at one point Diogenes the Cynic leaned his head in the door, then moved on. Fred Shuttlesworth, trumpet in hand, kept shouting, “Where’s the one? Where’s the one” Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, and Bobby Cherry, dressed in immaculate white Sufi gowns, whirling and whirling and whirling. …