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★Three Lobed Recordings

The Palm Leaves of Victory / Audio Letter to Mitch Meyers
The Sun City Girls were unlike any band before them or that has come in their wake. Their catalog, their ethos, their *being* - you name it, with the Girls that “it” was singular and became legend. This singularity started early and extended to their release schedule and the means behind the same. While the band would prove to be wildly prolific throughout their existence, during their nascent days they quickly realized that they could not be contained by any sort of traditional label schedule. …
Cloaven Theatre / That Old Western Sieve
The Sun City Girls were unlike any band before them or that has come in their wake. Their catalog, their ethos, their *being* - you name it, with the Girls that “it” was singular and became legend. This singularity started early and extended to their release schedule and the means behind the same. While the band would prove to be wildly prolific throughout their existence, during their nascent days they quickly realized that they could not be contained by any sort of traditional label schedule. …
Solved By Walking
It’s past being a commonplace—it’s probably in The Simpsons, etc. —there’s the one dancer at a show who doesn’t care. They aren’t necessarily older than everyone else, but that’s what comes to mind. Whether they are high or not is made irrelevant by their dancing, which is both highly personal and in Haight tradition. The kind of eye contact that’s made about the dancer changes, with the age of the showgoers, from an entertained not quite derision that helps build a faith in the non-dancing ways…
Music For Writers
Music for Writers is a wordless collection of pieces meant to accompany thought and inspire another way. It is music made in both stillness and motion, music that listens as much as it speaks. Each track offers a space—open, textured, often slow-moving—where ideas, images, and feelings drift in and out. It's a record I've been thinking about and wanting to make for a long time - my first solo instrumental album. The album was recorded across places—Brooklyn, Berlin, Latvia—using a minimal setup:…
Flam
"Flam" kicks off with a cinematic drone, followed by what sounds like water torture droplets, and a cacophony of clocks, and music boxes from childhood, and maybe something underwater. Something like a title arrives on the aural screen as GTD get down to the kind of business we love them for: that querying conversation between Steve Gunn’s guitar and John Truscinski’s drums and percussion, though here they venture into new territory, as Steve explains— “This 'Flam' session was open and experimen…
Nimbus
Blue Vinyl. Three Lobed and Sunburned Hand of the Man have a long history. The label has been releasing the group’s output for nearly two of its three decades of making music. As Sunburned has picked up momentum again in recent years, the label’s been right there, releasing the highly acclaimed "Pick a Day to Die" in 2020, and in late 2022 reissuing a 20th anniversary edition of "Headdress", the classic and confounding first Sunburned LP. Label head Cory Rayborn acted as the catalyst for storyte…
Arc of Night
On his 2023 release “Arc Of Day” Danny Paul Grody gathered an ensemble of musicians and gave us compositions that conjured not just bird-like flights but the supportive skeleton of a bird itself - intricate, delicate, but able to carry a body (or a listener) through bright, airy spaces. That same ensemble, since renamed the Danny Paul Grody Duo, now bring us "Arc Of Night" - a sister collection to "Arc Of Day", shaped from core collaborations between Grody and percussionist/drummer Rich Douthit …
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 …
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…
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…
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
Thirty years of non-idiomatic improvisation and Eastern-leaning drone from an American group that once had the guitarist Jack Rose in it. They know the American folk vernacular well and have never treated it as a museum.
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…
I Do Play Rock And Roll
Jack Rose was a practitioner of his own unique brand of modern Appalachia, a master of the steel string, whether finger picking or playing with a slide, Rose can coax amazing sounds from a guitar, and all by his lonesome create lush steel string guitarscapes, that range from haunting and mysterious to folky and familiar. This lp originally released in 2008 gathers up three long live tracks, all quite different. The first is a track from Kensington Blues, a big favorite around here, recorded…
Dr. Ragtime & His Pals
Back in the day, a new Jack Rose record was always cause for celebration around here. Along with James Blackshaw, Ilyas Ahmed, Richard Bishop and a few others, Rose was one of the new modern masters of the steel string guitar, helping to reinvent and redefine neo-Appalachia or modern folk or whatever you want to call it.Dr. Ragtime from 2008, features more of Rose's gorgeous steel string beauty, gossamer sheets of buzzing shimmer, droning ragas, traditional bluegrass, slippery slide, melancholy …
Tennessee & Other Stories...
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…
Fields Within Fields
They're back. Heavy Winged has continued to stretch their leathery, scarred, er, wings and grow since their last release for Three Lobed Recordings, 2008's Alive In My Mouth. The band was determined to make Fields Within Fields into a significant part of their discography from the very outset. In October 2009, the band decided to enter the 5D Studios in Brooklyn to engage in what would be a first-time experiment - recording in a multi-track studio with overdubs planned from the session's s…
Distillation
As one cog in the leaderless wheel known as the No-Neck Blues Band, Dave Shuford makes music so thoroughly unplanned that even he and his bandmates can't predict what it will sound like. NNCK don't just improvise, they don't even discuss what they're going to play, traversing many styles and moods with no safety net save the one that emerges from their collective creativity. Compared to NNCK's free-form tightrope-walk, Shuford's side project D. Charles Speer and the Helix can sound downright ris…