★Drag City
After Math - Art, Mystery - Part II (Book)
A new novel from the mind of Mayo Thompson is upon all who travel with us! Best known for his work with the psychedelic band, The Red Krayola, After Math is the sequel to Thompson's 2018 novella Art, Mystery. After Math retails what becomes of the cast of characters introduced in Art, Mystery, joint and severally pursuing an erotic Rinascimento statuette attributed to Antonio Pollaiuolo, a pursuit that lands them in court. On the way, their collective and singular fates are unfolded and accounte…
An evening with nehan
Nehan is a Japanese free improvisation/avant-garde rock quintet formed in 2022. Their performance is initiated by a 9HZ brain wave emitted from a testee who has been brought into a deep meditative state. nehan respond with gongs, typani, tabla and other percussion, crumhorn, bagpipes, oscillator and mellotron, passing tranformatively through a musical prism, from east to west, from traditional folk and classical to rock, jazz, and electronic.
Grief In The Kitchen And Mirth In The Hall
From our now-venerable, but ever thistle-sharp, Scots singer of new songs and old, comes a fifth full-length collection of traditional songs. Reaching down the centuries to unpack these numbers anew, Alasdair finds a set of eternal melodies – and with them, an unsettling number of surreal images that parallel the madness of our modern times.
Murmurs & Whispers
The return of P.G. Six’s deep acoustic focus, a devotional style honed from childhood ongoing. Pat Gubler’s salad years of playing the harp pay off after a one a few decades – here, he plays his Triplett Celtic model with pristine fingerwork and heavy soul. Evoking worlds, generations and future waves radiated from the folk tradition, Murmurs & Whispers finds P.G. at an apex of his special talent for earthly sounds with transcendent aspirations.
The Dream My Bones Dream
*2023 stock* Riding the rails down to the past and back to the future, Eiko Ishibashi considers the unknown lives that her own family has lived, set to expansive pop travelogues evoking the work of pioneers like Joni and Scott Walker, while pushing further, always further....
Cylene II
Tip! The second round of Cylene, Bonnet & O’Malley’s collaboration initiated in 2018 and continued without interruption since then in a slow stream of concerts, installations and recordings. A presentation of tones and resonances where harmonic intersections elevate from the deep and scale up to the far firmament in careful motion, drawing emotions viscerally from the chest, giving rise to the suggestibility of the soul.
Guitar Improvisations
For the 36th installment of our Catalytic Artist Albums series, we are excited to present an exclusive collection of improvisations on nylon string guitar by the exceptional, Tashi Dorji. Recorded over the month of August, this record showcases Dorji's most recent work and explorations on the guitar. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do!
Tashi Dorji
Tip! Early acoustic guitar improv performances from the Bhutanese expat, who’d come to Asheville, NC to study in 2000 and discovered worlds of anarcho-punk and avant garde such as he’d only dreamed. Having made recordings of his newly-located improvisational conception, he intuited a desire to go deeper in his explorations of the recorded sound of the guitar, melding and colliding traditional music with his feeling for the range of textures within.
Timeline
2023 marks the twenty-eighth year of Suarasama; it is also the first year for this reissue of their 2013 masterpiece, Timeline. Irwansyah Harahap and Rithaony Hutajulu, Ethnomusicology lecturers at University of Sumatera Utara, founded Suarasama in 1995 after graduating from the University of Washington Ethnomusicology program. Their music, as expressed on both Timeline and Fajar Di Atas Awan (first issued in 1998, reissued by Drag City in 2008) is hypnotic and joyful; progressing ancient North …
Gebel Barkal / Version
Reissue of the 2008 Sub Pop single, the first OM recording featuring Emil Amos on drums. Limited pressing.
The Forest In Me
More in tune now with the rhythm of the sun and moon, Xylouris White speak to each other across great distances with the intuition and fellowship that can only be found over years in each other’s company. With fewer distractions, appreciative of the freedom to play with new sounds and spaces, they carve The Forest In Me from unbelievably thin air.
Hawksworth
Several decades young on the trap kit, Matt Espy makes his solo bow with an album of solo drums, in dialogic flight with birdsong. Restaging a seminal moment from his seismic early days in music (and inner life), Matt references places he’s been between then and now with hallucinatory evocation. Hawksworth is a new organic space where percussive meditations on a life in music create NEW life in music, a comment on the nurture of nature itself.
Spiders In The Rain
With 2020 hindsight (and magic mics), we spy Wand in their late Plum/Laughing Matter quintet style, rolling up the west coast and rolling out the magic carpet. These nights spent communing with the crowds and jamming toward infinity (fittingly) promise that we’ll meet again, on nights like these further down the Möbius strip. But you knew this!!!
Through A Room
Using the looped-and-screwed methodology of Both, Nace takes a seismic step, building the process into a larger compositional process, employing guitar plus tapes, hurdy gurdy, doughnut pipe, quelle est belle and the nu Nace ax of choice, taishōgoto. Phrases talk to and obliterate each other, expanding and emerging into brave new unheard vistas.
Stone
Tip! *2022 stock.* Maine’s finest lonesome folkie back in the days of Woodstock was Bill Stone, who released one album on his own back in 1969. This classic ballad structure sounds like the voice of Tom Rapp and the quiet desolation of Leonard Cohen with more elevated psych guitar moves oscillating in and out of the mix.
"The psychedelically inclined folksinger Bill Stone recorded his lone album, “Stone,” in 1969, singing through a walrus mustache inside a Maine pottery studio. It may seem as if…
Flying Doesn't Help
Anthony Moore’s contribution to the post-punk pre-wave sound of London in 1979 – light with pop, fronted with meta-punk attitude and draped in strings of keyboard theory. As someone else said at the time, The perfect release! A lovely collision of art, pop and punk from the megacenter of all things in the rock and roll era.
Out
Slapp Happy's Anthony Moore, fresh off a year of collaboration with Henry Cow and the simultaneous dissolution of his own group, bounded up from the art-rock/20th century composition underground with this chart-challenging pop set for Virgin. Dropped before its planned release in ‘76, Out is an essential grab from the Britprog cutting room floor!
Kicking it off with a tricky asymmetrical keyboard riff reminiscent of Brian Eno’s Tiger Mountain, before rolling into a narrative that unites the mach…
The Echoing Shell
With their collaborative duo debut, Dean Spunt and John Wiese invite you to experience the frenzy of percussive space and discreet sound found inside The Echoing Shell.
Art, Mystery (Book)
* 2021 Stock * Art, Mystery’ is Mayo Thompson’s first published work of fiction since the 1960s. He is best known for his work with the psychedelic band The Red Krayola. "In ‘Art, Mystery’, a controversial former footballer, now export agent specializing in chrome, accepts an unusual commission from an odd source, the very man who brought him down, a former football referee turned art handler - to find and export a pornographic work of Renaissance art.
"Mr. Thompson has given us the perfect c…
Far View (LP)
Far View is a compilation of tracks from Joel Vandroogenbroeck’s series of library music releases for the Coloursound label — a uniquely trippy catalog of music vignettes long overdue for their day in the library music sun, remastered from the original analog reels! The late Joel Vandroogenbroeck was among that rare breed of musician who defy all categorisation, using music conventions to explore the far reaches of human and cosmic consciousness. After passing through the jazz and rock worlds f…