★Drag City
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…
Red Hash
** 2024 Stock ** LP version with bonus 7". "1973: Connecticut native Gary Higgins and his friends record Red Hash and release it on Gary's own Nufusmoon Records. Following the release, legal issues halt all promotion and sales, rendering the small pressing of Red Hash a hotly-rumored and much sought-after 'lost' album of rock and roll lore. 2005: Drag City is honored to present the first-ever authorized reissue of Gary Higgins' acid-folk gem Red Hash -- mastered from the original master tapes wi…
We Have Dozens of Titles
The first release from Gastr del Sol in over 25 years is nigh! Like a bolt echoing back from the blue, We Have Dozens of Titles restrikes the iron of Gastr del Sol, plunging us back into the maelstrom of David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke’s all too brief (but ultimately, long enough to change everything incisively) run together between 1993–1998. For We Have Dozens of Titles, Jim and David reconnected to assemble nearly an hour of previously unreleased live recordings — including their final performa…
Ghost
Formed in 1984, Ghost burgeoned slowly, blowing open the gate in 1990 with their eponymous debut. Opening with a vast spirit plosion – shards of antique light and clouds of centuries-old, dust-laden airs escaping from a primeval tomb – they settle into the deep feeling. A variety of mostly acoustic instruments aids their projection of traditional sounds from space and time, troubadours of unknown, an enigma of eternal trippiness all about them.
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…
Switched On Ra
To pour some out for one of their heroes, the cosmos’ own Sun Ra, Bitchin Bajas simply cut a slice of their own DNA and amplify it! Or something like that: they clearly vibe with Ra in hypno-symbiosis, setting the controls of their analog synths for the heart of Sun. Bonus mixtribute: a heartfelt doff to Queen Wendy C, sythnaut and another mother!
Bajascillators
With a tactile clunk, Bitchin Bajas (Cooper Crain, Rob Frye and Dan Quinlivan) bubble to the surface. Bajascillators, arriving almost five years since their last official full-length, 2017’s Bajas Fresh, is a riveting new full-length springing forth from the implacable, eternal gene pool that's also included soundtracks, re-imagined cuts from Sun Ra's catalog, and collaborations with Natural Information Society and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy among their illustrious recorded output. Following the flow…
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....
Advaitic Songs
*2023 stock* Already out of stock at source, few copies available...Where God Is Good was the first step in a more ornate and sophisticated direction for Om, Advaitic Songs achieves a level of composition that would've been impossible to foresee. There remains the singularity of purpose that is the core of all Om records, but no single reason can account for this comprehensive nature of their evolution. On this album the core primary sound of Om remains, yet everything reaches further and become…
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 …