★Three Lobed Recordings
Glass Band
"We have here three musicians with such a rich shared history that they might as well share the same blood. Each an accomplished solo artist in their own right, there’s a vibrant track record of collaborative work as well, with others and among themselves. The Gunn-Truscinski Duo has been a formal going concern for nearly a decade and a half, producing a fabulous string of albums for this label. Truscinski and Nace, along with Jake Meginksy, make up xo4, a group dating back to the early days of …
Arc of Day
The bones of a bird, stripped of flesh and feather, give no sign of the heights and depths a living bird can reach, the lengths it can travel, or the songs it can sing. The same is true of the bones of the human hand. For all their strength and delicacy, seeing them skeletal and stark obscures our knowledge of the rhythmic energy with which they engage space, the burdens they can bear, the music they can produce. Yet, in both bird and hand, the foundation of grace and motion remain. Music above …
Headdress
'I’ll set the scene – we’re all passed out face-down in the lawn of the first Bush term, scratching our heads after 9/11 and wondering how much more dystopian it’s about to get. Ash hangs in the air as we march toward endless war, and the activities of the post-hippie, post-beat, post-punk, post-jazz, post-industrial, post-experimental bohemian underground flail against the avalanche with a mystic fire you can’t get your arms around, let alone bottle up for consumption. Jars of tears, rockets fr…
In/Out/In
In mulling over their career, it’s staggering to realize that Sonic Youth not only delivered a healthy slab of releases as a unit but also have a myriad of shelved material still waiting for broader ears. While the group’s current Bandcamp abode lays out a generous amount of it, a bunch more has yet to surface. And it’s a massive mountain to chip away at in the sense of the group output alone; individual members’ projects are a whole other game, needless to say. "In/Out/In" ably delivers a new s…
Body/Dilloway/Head LP
This record is a head-on excavation of temporal fallibility, a collaboration between Kim Gordon(Sonic Youth, Body/Head, Free Kitten et al. and Bill Nace with Aaron Dilloway former member of Wolf Eyes or in innumerable other contexts.
Reticence / Resistance LP
"Reticence / Resistance" is the eighteenth Pelt album and the first since 2012. It was mastered by James Plotkin. Pressed on 140 gram 12 in Virginia by Furnace and housed within a gatefold jacket bearing new design elements from the band's Patrick Best. As a part of the Three Lobed Recordings 20th Anniversary series it features an OBI strip bearing an essay about the LP by Aquarium Drunkard's Tyler Wilcox. Edition of 700
Qalgebra (LP)
The stars aligned and in October 2014 Neil Hagerty (Royal Trux, Pussy Galore, The Howling Hex) and James "Wooden Wand" Toth went into a Denver studio with the crack rhythm section of Darin Gray (Tweedy, William Tyler, Wooden Wand) and Eric Van Leuven (The Howling Hex). The full length "Qalgebra" was the result of those sessions. Hagerty and Toth share songwriting and vocal duty with both of their unique voices and styles equally shining through. Shifted out of time, the Hagerty-Toth Band would h…
Piedmont Apocrypha (LP)
“I was born to lose; I won’t have this form forever.” So begins Horseback’s fifth full-length studio record, "Piedmont Apocrypha", with an incantation that could very well serve as the shapeshifting band’s raison d'être. Since before 2007, Horseback has served as a musical vehicle for multi-instrumentalist Jenks Miller (also of Mount Moriah and various solo outfits), chronicling his prolific, exuberant, and at times altogether whimsical investigation of heavy music(s) and their relationship with…
Blues From WHAT (LP)
North Carolina-native Jenks Miller is a bit too otherworldly to ever be pegged as a regional musician. Still, he seems to have the South in his bones. Not the false sheen associated with the so-called “new South,” mind you—with its tech startups and gallery spaces colonizing the re-purposed red brick warehouses; the hip speakeasies and fussy artisanal coffeehouses dotting the once somnolent and segregated main streets; the hikers and bikers streaming over the muddy tobacco roads. Not that place,…
Wooden Wand & The World War IV (LP)
You might have lost track of Wooden Wand some years back. No one would blame you. Under a decade into a recording career, his tangled discography had sprawled to Sun Ra-like breadth and complexity. He had parted ways with his longtime collaborators in the Vanishing Voice sometime around 2006, seemingly replacing them afresh with new (and newly named) backing groups on every subsequent release. He even threatened to jettison his own moniker—a threat he made good on for the pair of album he releas…
Tennessee & Other Stories... (LP)
three lobed recordings is extremely excited to be involved with divide by zero records in the release of tennessee & other stories…, Hans Chew’s debut solo album. while chew is best known as the honky-tonk pianist and auxiliary vocalist behind brooklyn’s psychedelic americana outfit d. charles speer & the helix (including his lead vocal turns on both “life insurance” off distillation, and “bar-abbas blues” off the “in madagascar” 7”), his skill as a piano player has also previously been on promi…
Kurt Vile | Steve Gunn (LP)
Kurt Vile and Steve Gunn collaborated for their contributions to Three Lobed Recording’s Parallelogram series. The two artists, originally connected by mutual friends and geographic proximity, have long pushed the other’s continued artistic development. Despite sharing many live stages over the years, this installation of Parallelogram represents the first time that the two have worked together in the studio. Vile’s side sees him recast tracks by John Prine (“Way Back When”) and Randy Newman (“P…
Water Weird (LP)
Long before the indie rock vampires got hip to the jam, Wet Tuna's Matt Valentine and PG Six (Pat Gubler) were twisting folk-blues, the avant garde, west coast and Swedish psychedelia into a fat one in the beloved underground unit Tower Recordings. Tower's journey ended some time ago but MV and PG Six found new paths—Matt mostly around the MV & EE tree and Pat's solo songwriter sojourns. These brothers of the steel-string reconvened a couple years ago to delve deeper into rural electrification …
Bay Head (LP)
It’s an anomaly to make a record created out of the pleasure and desire of simply making music together. A record with no commercial aspirational location. The new duo record from John Truscinski (drums, synths) and Steve Gunn (guitars), "Bay Head", makes it look easy, carving out a space where none existed before with assurance, resonating beautiful along the way. If I were forced to put what John and Steve play into a genre I would simply call it “music.” There’s a quality of timelessness to i…
Soundkeeper (2LP)
This music does not come out of nowhere. It comes from a guitar amplifier and a drum kit, and you are standing directly in front of them. And it’s beautiful, all dozen tracks of the Gunn-Truscinski Duo’s "Soundkeeper": beautiful loud exchanges between Steve Gunn’s shimmer-blast guitar and John Truscinski’s outside-in drums, beautiful quiet exchanges that hum, beautiful melodies that evoke long-lost screen worlds and old filmstock, beautiful phrases that telescope into saturating pinwheels. With…
Clipper Ship (LP)
Chickens were puzzling to early chemists and remain so. Despite a diet low in calcium, eggs laid by chickens contain a huge amount of calcium. Chickens, in that sense, are the only alchemists with proof that they are able to transmute an element; Wooden Wand’s 'Clipper Ship' album reminds me of that fowl alchemy, where the sum of songs’ parts add up to some impossible, elegant germination that cannot be reduced. Drones and lush arpeggiated codas spin out in concentric fractal patterns; the finge…
The Veiled Sea
I sometimes think of Ben Chasny as an occultist of the old school. For all the searing acetylene fire and noise that courses through his work as Six Organs of Admittance, there is something curiously late Victorian about the way his mind operates. For Chasny belongs to the lineage of seekers who, in the face of the fragmenting forms of knowledge in the modern world, held out the last hopes of synthesis: that art might not be parted from religion, nor religion from science—and that science, in so…
Pick A Day To Die
Sunburned Hand of the Man might be the last of the great American free rock collectives. There was a time, not too long ago, when every region of this great republic could boast of its own visionary troupe of seekers and improvisers, thrumming at the frequency of the illuminated world. There was Pelt in the south and Jackie-O Motherfucker in the Pacific northwest, No-Neck Blues Band in New York and the iridescent Jewelled Antler out in the Bay Area. And up in the New England wilds, there was The…
Axacan
There has never been an album quite like "Axacan", guitarist Daniel Bachman’s latest double LP. By defiantly playing against type and creating an album that, sonically and compositionally speaking, has more in common with Pierre Schaeffer or Edgard Varèse than John Fahey or even Jack Rose, Bachman has crafted one of the most introspective and deeply personal albums of instrumental music released in recent memory. "Axacan" weaves together acoustic guitar and harmonium alongside raw material from …
Jack Rose
John Coltrane died at age 40, and in retrospect it seems as if the intensity of activity in his last years, the sheer torrent of notes, was an attempt at purging the music from his soul before it was too late. The guitarist Jack Rose died at 38, in 2009, and listening back to his catalog one has a similar notion. Like Coltrane, Jack Rose’s last years were marked by a shimmering intensity, an outpouring of his spirit, onto audiences and records. I believe Jack Rose felt the duty of preservation b…