On his self-titled debut album, produced by and featuring William Tyler, the Georgia-bred singer and guitarist—student of Piedmont blues legend Precious Bryant and sideman to Rev. John Wilkins—transmutes ten arcane folk/blues tunes into vibey cosmic laments and crooked riverine rambles. Crack Nashville session vets Chris Scruggs, Brian Kotzur, and Hoot Hester crew the push boat.
A cinematic suite of contemplative, elastic set pieces that conjures the titular Virginian river/tribe/extinct county, the second solo album by Nathan Bowles (Black Twig Pickers, Pelt, Steve Gunn, HGM) deploys banjo, percussion, piano, and voice to explore the rugged country between the poles of Appalachian old-time traditions and ecstatic, minimalist drone. Featuring Tom Carter.
A heady and elliptical travelogue, Way Out Weather demonstrates a radical widescreen evolution, featuring a larger band and lighting out for lusher, more expansive and impressionistic territories than Time Off (2013). This is the virtuosic guitarist and songwriter’s career-defining statement to date, a self-assured masterpiece.
The 1971 and 1972 masterpieces, which span his song-based and improvisation-based styles of the early 1970s, are presented for the very first time as the definitive double album, as Cooper originally intended them to be released. These historic sessions veer from the impeccable conceptual folk-rock artistry of Places I Know to the utterly singular, long-form “songmaking” deconstructions of the more radical The Machine Gun Co.
The first artist-sanctioned reissue—and first-ever vinyl reissue—of iconoclastic English-born, Rome-based folk and experimental music legend Mike Cooper’s classic 1970 album, Trout Steel presents a heady homebrew of lap steel blues traditions, avant-jazz group improvisations, and studio explorations that presaged Cooper’s adventurous work for decades to come.
Widely recognized as the first openly gay country music album, Lavender Country stands as an artifact of courage. A political protest document of enormous power and grace, it sonically recalls some ethereal psych-folk nexus of the Flatlanders and the Holy Modal Rounders. Our deluxe reissue of this 1973 classic includes a 32pp chapbook featuring an oral history by songwriter Patrick Haggerty, color photos, and full lyrics to these songs of gay liberation.
M.C. Taylor recorded this spiritually devastating, austere antecedent to the celebrated HGM albums Haw and Poor Moon direct to a cassette recorder at the kitchen table of his pine-entwined home in rural North Carolina in 2010. Years after the destruction of much of the first edition of the album in a warehouse fire, this deluxe reissue restores the stark masterpiece to its intended full sequence, including three additional songs. (OUT OF PRINT)
Lauded guitarist and composer Chris Forsyth’s hypnotic recordings assimilate art-rock textures with vernacular American influences. This is his most ambitious, immersive, and sublime work of cosmic Americana yet, a face-melting 4-part suite of corporeal/ cerebral psychedelic bliss.
The self-titled debut by Promised Land Sound (formerly Promised Land) finds the young Nashville band cooking up some serious red dirt/swamp boogie & country-fried choogle à la Jim Ford, Link Wray, and Dennis Linde, with tunes that are singularly propulsive, but reflectively rooted in the finest Southern songcraft. William Tyler guests.
His first album with a band featuring J. Truscinski (drums) and J. Tripp (bass), Time Off showcases the virtuosic guitarist’s oblique character sketches and story-songs, using the trio format to launch his compositions and singing into new, luminous strata. This is Gunn at the top of his game, utterly unique but steeped in traditions both vernacular and avant-garde.
