★Drag City
RTZ
Triple LP gatefold of long out of print and limited 4-track bedroom psych from the early years of Six Organs Of Admittance.
Hoffman Estates
A large ensemble improv album, featuring Ken Vandermark, Rob Mazurek, Kevin Drumm, Rick Rizzo, Darin Gray, etc. O'Rourke decided to pair up Loren with Alan Licht. A full day of improvising was recorded, selected, and then arrangements were later added by O'Rourke in a sort of Gil Evans/Miles Davis move, or more appropriately Teo Maceo meets Mazza-Licht. Organized like a continuum of music that brings new meaning to 'suite' (or at the very least, a flexible new spelling), the record is at once a …
The Thicket
David Grubbs' first pop proper solo LP. There's a proud equilibrium to The Thicket. The arrangements are consistent (and consistently colorful) throughout the record. When you first hear a banjo or a trumpet or a Tony Conrad, you can bet your bottom dollar that you'll hear it again. Thus, the record is purged of exoticisms. The Thicket is many things, and elusive is not among them. It's a straight-40-to-the-head album of pop sonic lucidity.
The Spectrum Between
Six months in the making, The Spectrum Between reflects the changes brought on by David's relocation from Chicago, a home of ten years, to Crooklyn. No longer able to easily draw upon the musical associations built up over years spent in the midwest, David progressed slowly with the new material. Eventually, a worldwide pool of collaborators were drawn into the project -- including Noel Akchote, and others from the Rectangle records collective, Swedish reed sensation Mats Gustafsson, and the omn…
Rickets & Scurvy
Three albums into his solo adventure, David has clearly learned how to make records work as records, filling them start to finish with entertainment, moments, insight. Rickets & Scurvy is a very complete, start-to-finish kind of beast. The songs kick ass, rocking harder than David's songs have in ages. The process goes further as a result. Rickets & Scurvy's best moments are presented with disarming directness, an ability to plunge to great depth, with abandon.
An Optimist Notes The Dusk
Blow UP record of the month "A step into the void' is how David Grubbs describes An Optimist Notes The Dusk, his first solo album since 2004's A Guess At The Riddle. Much the same way that each of Gastr del Sol's albums sought to avoid precedent and to model a world in which nothing should be taken for granted, An Optimist Notes The Dusk steps into the void. Nothing necessitates -- it's all built from the ground up, and at each step of the way it could have been built differently. David Grubbs' …
Dat Rosa Mel Apibus
White Magic is the songwriting and vocal lyricism of Mira Billotte engaged by the talented likes of 'Sleepy' Doug Shaw, Jim White (Dirty Three), Tim DeWit (Gang Gang Dance), Tim Barnes, Samara Lubelski, Shahzad Ismaily, Jesse Lee, Karen Leblanc and Brad Truax. White Magic's debut full length album Dat Rosa Mel Apibus is an elaborate evolution from the first release. It is a journey which sets forth into an untamed musical landscape, finding the familiar in unusual streams of new sound -- a new m…
Polytheistic Fragments
Last copies: as a member of SUN CITY GIRLS & co-founder of the Sublime Frequencies label, he's a comfortable traveler in the vast landscape of ethno-musical tradition & renowned for his prowess & mastery w/ the guitar, but the piano playing shows a fluid, meditative style. In a record w/ so many spirits, Bishop fills in the space where necessary & rounds out the feeling w/ catchy tunes. This shows that the divinely inspired Sir Richard Bishop cannot be contained in one form." Fragments is a spec…
Sighs Trapped By Liars
With the entirely new music statement, Sighs Trapped by Liars, The Red Krayola renew their association with conceptual artists, Art & Language. Beginning in 1973, their collaboration includes the video projects 'Nine Gross and Conspicuous Errors,' and 'Struggle in New York,' as well as the much-acclaimed and decried music releases, Corrected Slogans, Kangaroo?, and Black Snakes. Thirty years has mellowed the various parties not at all. The faint-hearted might want to swallow something calming be…
Soldier Talk
The Red Crayola's Soldier-Talk returns at last. Drag City Records are proud to announce that, after having been missing in action for twenty-eight years, this vital, much acclaimed work is now available again. Soldier-Talk appeared first on Radar Records. A custom label built around Elvis Costello, financed and distributed by WEA, Radar had licensed the International Artists catalog in 1978 and had already re-released the band's first album, The Parable of Arable Land, and first single, 'Wives i…
Live 1967
Rescued from a long slumber of loathe, these live tapes of the Houston Red Crayola rejoin us to the truth about flower power: all free, all form, all freaked out.
Songs From The Source
Twelve amazing songs recorded live in the Father House garage as a rehearsal for a live date that Spirit of '76 (aka YaHoWa 13, also now known as Children of the Sixth Root Race, Father Yod's "house band") had at the Whisky in the summer of 1973. It's still a mystery how a 1/4" tape copy of the recording was found in Chicago in 2006. Djin Aquarian, guitarist of Children of the Sixth Root Race and composer of all but one of the songs on the album, recalls being sent on a mission to Chicago later …
Mimidokodesuka
Originally released on CD in Japan in 2006. CD version. Released on LP & CD by Drag City on May 20, 2008. Features Jim O'Rourke on electric guitar, Darin Gray on doublebass and Chris Corsano on drums. Recorded live at the Pit Inn in Tokyo during a 2005 residency that included sets with alto sax legend Akira Sakata (recordings of which have been released separately and elsewhere).
Halfway to a Threeway
1999 EP release, repressed 2009. "It seems like it was only a few months ago that Jim O'Rourke changed everything with the release of the incredible Eureka. And by George, it was only a few months ago. Well never mind -- here he is again with a little more of the same: pop music, but credibly different this time, of course. The pop stylings of Jim O'Rourke will never seem familiar to any of us (that's not his style, silly) but his combination of folk, classic rock, (smooth jazz) and the i…