The hind of 2023—our thirteenth year as a label—is nearly behind us, and herein lies its final Paradisiacal dispatch. Our tenth annual Krampus Day Sale is live! Through December 13, get 25% off (almost) anything in our webstore or Bandcamp with coupon code KRAMPUS.
Setting’s mesmerizing, meditative new album Shone a Rainbow Light On is finally here—shipping, in shops, and streaming worldwide. Early critical acclaim includes a 9/10 review by Uncut and a 4/5 review by MOJO, who call it “heavenly.” We agree wholeheartedly. Step into the pocosin.
“Everything exists and everything will happen and everything is alive and everything is planned and everything is a mystery, and everything is dangerous, and everything is a mirage, and everything touches everything, and everything is everything, and everything is very, very strange.”
— Roxy Gordon, text inscribed on a painting (1988)
Everything is very, very strange. All you have to do is listen.
Mike Cooper wrote his final songwriter record, a suite of gloaming glam-rock anthems performed with a spiritual jazz trio, while living on the Costa Tropical of Granada, Spain, an era when he was considering retiring from music altogether. A chance encounter and a last-ditch record deal convinced him to make one last album, which he recorded in 1974 at Pathway Studios in London, with “The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World,” featuring the inventive South African jazz rhythm section of Louis Moholo and Harry Miller with UK saxophonist Mike Osborne.
This first-ever reissue includes a bonus CD of Milan Live Acoustic 2018, a previously unreleased solo set that represents Cooper’s return, after forty-four years pursuing free improvisation and electronics, to a new, deconstructed approach to singing, steel guitar, and songcraft.
Arrestingly singular and deeply moving, this 1988 album by Choctaw, Assiniboine, and Texan poet, journalist, artist, activist, and musician Roxy Gordon (First Coyote Boy) (1945–2000)—whose long out-of-print work has been acclaimed by friends such as Townes Van Zandt, Leonard Cohen, and Terry Allen—sets his cold-blooded, bone-lean reflections on the complexities and contradictions of American Indian (and American) history and identity to atmospheric, synth-damaged country-rock that skirts ambient textures and postpunk deconstructions.
Uncut’s Sounds of the New West CD offers an exclusive premiere of Setting, new trio formed by Nathan Bowles, Jaime Fennelly, and Joe Westerlund.
Y’all, it’s been a while—we missed you. The end of 2022 has been a wild ride, and herein is its final Paradisiacal dispatch. ‘Tis the season to give records to beloved friends and family (and to yourself too). In lieu of the madness of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we prefer to observe Krampus Day (honoring the Central European folkloric anti-Santa critter).
Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day. We’re honored to share much more from the great poet, artist, activist, and musician Roxy Gordon (First Coyote Boy) with you soon.
Our reissues of songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen’s albums Smokin the Dummy (1980) and Bloodlines (1983), are out—shipping, in shops, and streaming—today, May 6, 2022, the day before Terry’s 79th birthday. (Today is also Bandcamp Friday, when Bandcamp waives their fee and passes on all revenues to artists and labels.) These two records comprise our sixth and seventh releases by Allen and the eagerly anticipated continuation of our acclaimed, GRAMMY-nominated archival series in collaboration with the artist. They have been very close to our hearts for twenty years; Bloodlines was the first Terry record I owned on vinyl, a gift from my friend John Ollman of the Fleisher/Ollman Galleryin Philadelphia, where Allen exhibited his artwork during the Chippy era.
We are thrilled to announce deluxe reissues of internationally celebrated songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen’s Smokin the Dummy (1980) and Bloodlines (1983), comprising our sixth and seventh releases by Allen and the eagerly anticipated continuation of our acclaimed GRAMMY-nominated archival series in collaboration with the artist.
