Loren Connors
Loren Connors’ music speaks of a loneliness that’s almost devastating in its purity. At its best, Connors’ music works at a cellular level, as though the fundamental nature of the piece is implicit in the very first note played: a flower just ready to bloom. But while Connors’ music often comes across as gentle and fragile, sometimes edging close to the vacuum of silence, there is great confidence and courage at its heart.
Loren Connors’ music speaks of a loneliness that’s almost devastating in its purity. At its best, Connors’ music works at a cellular level, as though the fundamental nature of the piece is implicit in the very first note played: a flower just ready to bloom. But while Connors’ music often comes across as gentle and fragile, sometimes edging close to the vacuum of silence, there is great confidence and courage at its heart.
Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell!
A crucial piece of the Loren Connors jigsaw falls into place with this first ever vinyl reissue of Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell!, now presented on wax some 20 years after the original CD issue thru The Lotus Sound. Leading on from his classic Long Nights (on Table of the Elements), it takes that album’s blues-noise textures into even starker, scorched ground surely irresistible to anyone snagged by his other works, for their anomalous nature if nowt else.Revolving around 12 works in under 20 min…
Robert Crotty With Me: Loren's Collection (1979-1987)
Riveting compendium of stark, raw blues by an erstwhile sparring partner of Loren Connors, recently salvaged from an old shoebox of tapes, restored by Taylor Deupree and mastered by Carl Saff. "I would go as far as to say that the few recordings that exist of these Robert Crotty sessions are among the finest and most beautiful blues documents of all time." (Loren Connors). In the years 1978 to 1981, Robert Crotty would show up on Loren Connors’ doorstep in New Haven, Connecticut with his ti…
Evangeline
First-time available on vinyl (pressed as a limited CD in 1998), Evangeline finds Connors working in a narrative structure. This album trails the story of Evangeline, the heroine of an epic-poem written in 1847. Loren’s guitar tone follows the weary landscapes and mournful souls of the characters. Thematically Evangeline falls in line with the other romantic Loren Connors LPs Recital as published, Airs and Lullaby, though with a defining arc in direction. Parallel guitar preludes begin this…
Blues: The "Dark Paintings" of Mark Rothko
Blues: The ‘Dark Paintings’ of Mark Rothko is one of Loren Connors’ most cherished and sought after albums. Originally released in a handmade edition of 200 or so copies on Connors’ own St. Joan imprint in January 1990 under the name Guitar Roberts -- Blues has been unavailable in any form until now. At time of its release, Connors was still an inscrutable guitarist whose matchless and alien rendering of the blues was just gaining recognition despite more than a dozen solo and collaborative rele…
Lullaby
Following the breathtaking Airs, another gem from Loren MazzaCane Connors "story of shadowed miniatures; flickering electronic guitar poems,” the 14-track album was originally burned to CD-R in an edition of 100, but is now being remastered from the original tapes, with Loren’s recent artwork included as a 6”x9” insert reaches vinyl on Sean McCann’s Recital imprint. Lullabies renders Connors at his most sublime, wistfully sanguine, swaddled in tape distortion and gentle reverbs with a barely the…
The Departing Of A Dream Vol. V
After ten years, guitarist Loren Connors returns to his much acclaimed and beloved The Departing of a Dream series. Initially based loosely as tribute to Miles Davis' masterwork "He Loved Him Madly," Connors delves further into the inspiration to explore melody as a slow-moving spectrum of shades projected against a fragile, often decaying ambience.Volume Five continues the theme, as Connors coaxes complex blues mutations and wide swathes of distant vibrating tones -- not unlike the expre…
Lost City
Lost City project started as a series of photographs shot by visual artist and composer Aki Onda in New York starting right after 9.11 in 2001. A decisively introspective response to the major world event taking place, his pictures were devoid of direct references, but documented his immediate surroundings, focusing on how what happened resonated on a personal micro-level.Since 2005, Onda has been presenting this series as slide projections, which function as a visual score for improvisation, a…
Moonyean
**last copies** Re-release of a heartbreaking, beautifully enigmatic masterpiece by the venerable guitar virtuoso Loren Connors. "In 1994, after the Hell's Kitchen Park album and Mother & Son 7” ep had come out, a semi-sequel to the latter was released by Table of the Elements in the form of a 7-inch ep called The Five Points. The record told a short story of a New York City slum of that name, which counted the city's most mortalities in the year 1857, of which most were Irish children under six…
A Fire
23 minute piece of solo guitar wrangling by the avant blues elder statesman. Limited, hand-numbered edition of 350 housed in screen-printed wrap-around with insert in poly jacket** "Connors is an avant-garde legend, with more than 100 releases of his singular alien take on the blues. RIYL: Jack Rose, Michael Chapman, Jim O’Rourke, John Fahey. A Fire is a single-sided LP by master guitarist Loren Connors. Recorded live in Philadelphia in 2010, this 23 minute piece follows in the style and visual …
Are You Going To Stop... In Bern?
"In fact, the art of O'Rourke and Connors lies in letting one feel the immobility withi n movement, and in instilling movement right at the heart of immobility. It's almost superfluous to say that this music belongs to the realm of dreams, it's music for the mind, abstract and yet wholly present to itself and therefore totally concrete too. The two guitarists set off in search of sound. Their quest is wildly raging now and then, but only for a brief moment, most of the time it's contempla…
Red Mars
Loren Connors has long been heralded as one of the country's most inimitable guitar voices. Like kindred spirit John Fahey, Connors' legacy began by quietly self-releasing a series of raw and embryonic LPs. Since the late 1970s, Connors' use of haunted Delta Blues, minimalism and compositional underpinnings have become an avant-garde style synonymous to him. Along the way, musicians diverse as Chan Marshall, Keiji Haino, Darin Gray, Jim O'Rourke, Jandek, and Alan Licht have sought Connors…
Autumn's Sun
A small chapbook (50 pages) of writing by guitarist MazzaCane Connors. Autumn's Sunfeatures diary excerpts written in New Haven, CT in 1987. Presumably typeset to resemble his original typewritten document, with hand-written aisle comments left in. A six page piece on Loren's experiences standing outside John & Carolyn Kennedy Jr's loft in July 1999 is included at the end of the book.
Into the Night Sky
Into the Night Sky is the sixth album from avant guitarists Alan Licht and Loren Connors, the first after 2003's In France (FBWL). Since 1993 these New York City artists have evolved an instrumental dialogue merging shades of electric blues and minimalism. These two epic pieces -- one from 1996, the other 2006 -- recorded live in concert clearly show far their desolate sound world grew over a decade of collaboration while the core of layered guitar complexities and alien melodies remain. T…
Restless
Once again, Chapter Music revisits the Kath Bloom and Loren Connors catalogue, presenting deluxe reissues of the duo's 1984 albums Restless Faithful Desperate and Moonlight, the last two albums they made together. Originally released in pressings of 200-300 copies via Connors' St. Joan label, much of this material hasn't really been given a decent airing until now, but they're in fine and elegiac form throughout this double album, notably arriving at all-time standouts within their discography l…
The Curse Of Midnight Mary
The horror movie-styled title and that creepy-as-you-like sketch (by Connors himself) that adorns the sleeve should hint at the kind of nefarious doings that surround the making of this long-lost Loren Connors album. According to the tale, Midnight Mary (aka 19th century Connecticut resident Mary Hart) suffered an attack and fainted, believed to be dead. Her husband had her buried only for Mary's sister to wake up at midnight having had a nightmare about her sister screaming from within the grav…
Curse of Midnight Mary
Recorded between his eight volume "Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations" LP series & the folk albums he would make w/ Tom Hanford & Kath Bloom, these 9 pieces meld those distinct forms. Singing in a trance like moan, he reforms the Mississippi Delta blues on his acoustic guitar w/ flashes of melodic hooks & a percussive guitar style that erupts into boogie-woogie riffs & other world spirituals.
Two Nice Catholic Boys
...Catholic Boys" Together they unravel slow motion ghost blues across three extended pieces that evolve from the elder's martian style to the thundering, feedback splattered lead grooves of that whippersnapper. The spontaneous melodies shift from devastating, country road intimacy to hypnotic overamped rock. It's ferocious, epic, & an utter beauty.
The Moon Last Night
The Moon Last Night perfectly captures the complex and contemporary guitar style of Loren Connors - totally desolate yet wound in echoy, rich black clouds that weep of Mississippi ghost blues and chiming strings. This two part suite combines the artist's love of choral music, Giacinto Scelsi and the naked Venusian guitar style he evangelized across a string of private press LPs in the late 1980s. Conjured solely from a Fender six-string and reverb effects, solitary notes swirl and loft gently fr…
The Departing Of A Dream Vol. II
Avant guitar legend Loren Connors (aka Loren MazzaCane Connors) returns with the sequel to 2002's critically acclaimed The Departing of a Dream. The NYC blues guitarist, who has been recording and releasing albums since 1978, extends the theme (which was a loose tribute to Miles Davis' 'He Loved Him Madly') into a fragile and floating eight-part piece of acoustic/electric/ and bass guitar mixed with field recordings and the unsettling ménage of found sounds and ambient hiss. Whereas the first De…
As Roses Bow: Collected Airs 1992-2002
As roses bow: Collected Airs 1992-2002 is Loren Connors' Assembly of his most melodically rich and stunning miniature compositions. Inspired by O'Carolan's airs and other Irish airs of the pAst, these works, recorded during a ten year period, are melded with the distinctly personal and iconoclAst adaptation of Connors' blues. These 43 pieces are Connors' complete airs, culled from 10 albums (eight of which are out of print) and one single, including his groundbreaking Hell's Kitchen Park (Black …