The Milk-Eyed Mender
2024 repress. "Drag City takes great pleasure in introducing to you a remarkable new musical singer, songwriter and all-around talent, Joanna Newsom. Joanna's music has more of an affinity with the folk revival of the 60s, or the bluegrass movement at present, than with most contemporary 'folk' (or 'anti-folk') scenes. Affinities aside, her style could hardly be called bluegrass; nor does it evoke the pastoral tonalities of 60s folk: she sings about whalebones, sleep, grammar, mollusks, accumula…
Ys
2024 stock. Double LP version; deluxe gatefold sleeve, with inserted 12"x12" booklet of lyrics. "Five songs, fifty-five minutes, what-an-album! Ys is to Joanna Newsom a dream collaboration between her voice and harp and a full orchestra -- a sound many of us fans have thought we were hearing when listening with closed eyes at her concert performances. Songs familiar to Joanna's following are a big part of Ys, having been performed in concert over the past year -- but not with the arrangements yo…
Eureka
2024 repress; originally released in 1999. LP version. "Jim O'Rourke is doing for himself what he's more than generously done for other so-called musical talents. Everybody wants a little pop in their lives and the O'Rourke is no exception. There is no way to listen to Eureka without hearing the eccentricity, the progressive musical textures, the utter lack of anything like pop music, but at the same time it's magnificent in scale, pleasant to listen to, catchy and even reminiscent of other reco…
Insignificance
2024 Repress. Insignificance, Jim O'Rourke's third solo album for Drag City, reaffirms that he is not only a fine composer, arranger, and producer, but a gifted, creative songwriter as well. As with Eureka and the Halfway to a Threeway EP, O'Rourke continues to find as many possibilities in singing and songwriting as he does experiment with pure sound. However, this time O'Rourke adds a few twists to the formula he pioneered on those two efforts.
He sings on each of Insignificance's tracks, his…
Halfway to a Threeway
2024 stock. "Well, never mind--as long as people love it, here's another few sides of long-ago and far-away Jim O'Rourke back on vinyl for the first time since way back in the mid-aughties. It's the Halfway to a Threeway 12" EP back to set turntables a-spinnin'! Fans of Eureka and Insignificance (not to mention Jim's tomfoolery as part of the Loose Fur band) will appreciate the analog pressing of these four slices of the pop music party-pooper combination of folk, classic rock, smooth jazz and a…
Zine Issue Seven
48 page A5 zine. Printed on high quality PEFC certified recycled stock. With the sun at its lowest ebb, and the night stretching to its longest duration of the year, we offer up Weird Walk Issue Seven as a symbol of the continuing cycle of rot and renewal, death and new life.
Taking inspiration from the woodland, author Nadia Attia explores the folklore surrounding some of Britain’s iconic tree species, while leafy associations abound as we reflect upon the Hastings Jack in the Green festival, a…
Voices, An Acousmatic Trip (CD)
Starting from the end of 2022, as part of an urban regeneration project through artistic experimentation, I recorded the sounds of the industrial area of Bari but also the voices of the elderly and children. Over time the sounds (human voices but also the voices of machinery transport and non-human nature) began to mix in the memory and under the action of the imagination.
Traces, An Acousmatic Path (2CD)
These acousmatic works, united by a unitary narrative path, refer to a compositional "canon", implicitly inaugurated by Luc Ferrari in the 60s, which proposes real "sound photographs", which he defined, even ironically, "anecdotal music". Just as some of the trends in painting, plastic arts and photography are figurative - that is, they represent the world in an iconic way (with a greater or lesser level of realism) - in the same way many of Ferrari's acousmatic works consist, at the base, of M…
Les Olivensteins
2024 stock. LP version. The best-ever French '77 punk band, next to Metal Urbain. Killer and cult and a true must-have. This is an official reissue, with a lot of unissued tracks. "In a particularly raw moment captured on the disk you are holding, the singer (whose name escapes me) shouts derisively at the audience, 'Vivement que je sois vieux, tout sec et tout rugueux?" (trans. 'I can't wait to be old, dried out and bumpy'). And indeed, it required not only the passage of three decades, with th…
Des Jeunes Gens Mödernes (Post Punk, Cold Wave Et Culture Novö En France 1978 - 1983)
2024 stock. This compilation, originally released in 2008, explores the French vaults of French post-punk, electro-pop and French no wave. Between the late '70s and mid-'80s, in the wake of the punk wave and in parallel to other types of music like disco, funk, ska and reggae, a prolific and chaotic music scene began to develop in France, combining the energy of rock and the nihilism of punk with electronic experimentation. The period was not, on the whole, one of optimism and joy, played out as…
Stop Vicious Cycles
**Original 1982 copies, still sealed and log time stored (copies may have minimal wear on covers)** Jill Kroesen with Peter Gordon, David Van Tieghem, "Blue" Gene Tyranny, Bill Laswell, George Lewis, Arthur Russell, and others; produced by Peter Gordon
The subjects of Kroesen's songs range from the old Wayne Hayes sex scandal to Alexander the Great, to tunes of personal and political exploitation. On the first side she rocks, rolls, wails, and whines her way through songs with spunky, sometimes …
An Hour For Piano
**Original 1979 copies, still sealed and log time stored (copies may have minimal wear on covers)** A trance music piece made up of repeating 4/4 cells in which an absolutely steady eighth-note motion predominates. Often several cells are going on simultaneously, and one cell frequently mutates into another through the addition or subtraction of a note or two. One has to step back far enough to get a perspective on the large-scale shifts in density and tonality before the impact of An Hour For P…
Fire & Ice
**Original 1982 copies, still sealed and log time stored (copies may have minimal wear on covers)** Intriguingly sets the apocalyptic Robert Frost poem, with trumpeter Yousef Yancy as the ice and Garrett List as the fire. Haunting settings of vital dada poet Blaise Cendrars' incandescent lines and Sweetness, an ineffably lovely poem by Bayard Lancaster, whose alto parallels soaring synthesizer parabolas, and the riveting voice of Genie Sherman, whose sinuous, sibilant messages are those of pure…
Western Classics
**Original 1982 copies, still sealed and log time stored (copies may have minimal wear on covers)** Ned Sublette, voice, guitar and piano; Jack Carr, harmony fiddle; Nelwyn Essary, rhythm mandolin; O.C. "Dink" Essary, melody fiddle; L.W. McGuffin, tenor ukelele; Bill Vance, lead mandolin; Lois Vance, rhythm guitar
Sublette's trip into the folk roots of country music. Post-modern cowboy music that simultaneously exults in and pokes fun at, and stretches the boundaries of genre conventions. The hi…
Sensory Symphonies
* 99 copies, numbered * Akifumi Nakajima, renowned for his prolific and captivating work under the alias Aube, stands as one of Japan's most intriguing noise artists. His artistic prowess extends beyond the sonic realm, encompassing an impeccable sense of design and a deep appreciation for materials. Nakajima's creative journey began in 1980, but it wasn't until the early '90s, prompted by a request to compose music for an art installation involving water, that he stepped into the forefront. Thi…
Control And Its Opposites
“Eighty minutes of trumpet/electronics and alto sax. Here, the length works in its favor. An advantage, oddly, to listening at home (and reading the back of the sleeve): You know it's 80 minutes long so you "read" it as such, as it's happening, sitting back a bit, seeking a wider focus. Wright gets nicely strident here and there, Coleman generally staying with breath tones early on, getting more vociferous later, Kasyansky hither and yon, doing a fine job integrating and coloring. There's a brea…
Meshes
Trombone, electronics and cello, the trio opts for a sparser, more irregular path, with perhaps a higher degree of difficulty. Two cuts, both emerging more or less unscathed, but somehow striking me as overly forced. Actually, it's a tough one for me to call; sometimes it has a searching quality that's very appealing, other times I hear it less as "searching" and more as "casting about". Again, I don't believe this series of discs are meant as statements or finished projects, more as snapshots; …
A Life Saved By A Spider And Two Doves
As George Lewis recently said, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between improvised and composed music. It’s a distinction he would like to see dropped. For much of its length this delicately nuanced recording could quite easily be a formal electroacoustic composition, an impression strongly reinforced by the fact that Evan Parker sounds curiously unfamiliar in this new grouping. He’s well used now to working with electronics, but this was a first convocation of this quart…
Endspace
Duo improvisations recorded at Goldsmiths College in South London
Hum
Quartet improvisations for trumpet, flute, harp and bass clarinet